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(13599—10 M.) 


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♦ • 


V 


\ 



LOTUS-EATING. 






A-, 

/r-U#* 


LOTUS-EATING: 


A SUMMER BOOK. 


BY 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

AUTHOR OF “NILE NOTES,” “ HOWADJI IN SYRIA.” ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED BY KENSETT. 


“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” 


) > 

> > > 

) 't 
) > > 

NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
FRANKLIN SQUARE. 

186 8 . 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand 
eight hundred and fifty-two, by 

Harper & Brothers, 


in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District 
of New York. 

TransS? 

JUN 5 190/ 


TO 


CHARLES A. DANA. 

®!)e £ inters 

ORIGINALLY ADDRESSED TO THE EDITOR, 

ARE' NOW 


AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED TO THE FRIEND. 


New York, June, 1852 

































































(Cnnhiits 


Pago 

I. —The Hudson and the Rhine, ..... 11 

II.— Catskill,.28 

III.— Catskill Falls, .43 

IY.—Trenton,. 69 

V. —Niagara,. 75 

VI. —Niagara, again, . . . 89 

VII.— Saratoga,. 105 

VIII. —Lake George,. 127 

IX.— Nahant,. 145 

X. —Newport,. 163 

XI. —Newport, again,. 179 

























V 

































































































































' 















































THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 






* 
















I. 


■®{j i Ittirsott unit iJ je Ejim. 


July. > 

Newburgh on the Hudson. $ 
here could a man meet 
the summer more 
pleasantly than in the 
fragrant silence of a 
garden whence have 
emanated the most 
practical and poetic 
suggestions toward 
the greater dignity, 
comfort and elegance 
of country life ? If the aspect of our 
landscape yearly improves, in the 
'(ftljr beauty of the houses, and in tasteful and 
|/ |iy‘ picturesque rural treatment, our enjoyment 
of it will be an obligation to Mr. Downing. 

Hot four days away from the city, I have not yet 
done roaming, bewildered with the summer’s breath, 
through the garden, smelling of all the flowers, and 



12 


LOTUS-EATING. 


returning to lie upon the lawn, and bask, dreaming, 
in the July sun. What a cold word is “beautiful” 
to express the ecstasy which, in some choice moments 
of midsummer, suddenly overwhelms your mind, like 
an unexpected and exquisite thought. 

I found a few late spring-flowers this morning, upon 
the lawn, and welcomed them with Robert Herrick’s 
Greeting to the Yiolets : 

Welcome, maids of honor, 

You do bring 
In the Spring, 

And wait upon her. 

She has virgins many, 

Fresh and fair; 

Yet you are 
More sweet than any. 

You ’re the Maiden Posies, 

And so graced 
To be placed 
’Fore damask roses. 

Yet though thus respected, 

By-and-by, 

You do lie, 

Poor girls, neglected. 

As I lay repeating these lines, whose melody is as 
delicate as the odor of the flowers they sing, I saw 
the steamer, crowded with passengers, hurrying 
away from the city. For none more than the Amer¬ 
icans make it a principle to desert the city, and none 
less than Americans know how to dispense with it. 


THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 13 

So we compromise by taking the city with ns, and 
the country gently laughs us to scorn. 

Although the day was tropical, on which we left 
Hew York, the “Reindeer” ran with us as if we had 
been mere Laplanders, and our way a frozen plain, 
instead of the broad, blue river. It is only in the 
steamer that the Hudson can be truly perceived and 
enjoyed. In the Indian summer, the western shore, 
seen from the railroad, is a swiftly unrolling pano¬ 
rama of dreams; yet the rush, and roar, and sharp 
steam-shriek would have roused Rip Yan Winkle 
himself, and the dust would have choked and blinded 
him as he opened his eyes. The railroad will answer 
to deliver legislators at Albany, although which 
“ side up” is a little uncertain. But the traveller who 
loves the law of beauty and pursues pleasure, will 
take the steamer and secure silence, cleanliness, suf¬ 
ficient speed, and an unencumbered enjoyment of 
the landscape. 

If the trains are as thronged as the.boats, they do 
well. It was curious to set forth upon a river-excur¬ 
sion, surrounded by hundreds bent upon similar sum¬ 
mer pleasures, and yet see no red hand-book and no 
state-travelling carriage upon the forward deck, with 
a state-travelling countenance of an English milord 
on the inside, and the ruddy, round cheeks of state¬ 
travelling Abigails, in the rumble behind. These are 


14 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Rhenish reminiscences. But they are as much part 
of a journey up the Rhine as Drachenfels or St. 
Goar. 

John Bull, upon his travels, is an old joke, as well 
to himself as others ; and the amusement is never 
exhausted. Yet he is the boldest and best of travel¬ 
lers. He carries bottled ale to Nineveh, and black 
tea to the top of Mont Blanc, and haunts Norwegian 
rivers with the latest improved angling “ flies but 
he carries integrity, heroism, and intelligence, also. 
His patriotism amounts to prejudice ; yet, if there is 
any cosmopolitan, it is John Bull. He takes pride, 
indeed, in asserting his prejudices, and insisting 
upon his black tea everywhere and in all societies. 
But his sublime skepticism of any excellence out of 
England is pleasanter than our crude mixture of 
boastfulness and subserviency. It was remarkable 
during the revolutions of 1848, in Europe, that there 
were no monarchists so absolute as the Americans. 
They declared, almost to a man, that Europe was not 
fit for republicanism. As if time would ripen re¬ 
publics from despotism, so that, like mellow pears, 
they would fall off without any confusion; or as if it 
were the habit of kings to educate their subjects to 
dispense with royalty. 

But it is still very amusing to see how the English 
patronize the continent. They ascend the Rhine im- 


THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 


15 


perturb ably. They evidently feel that they are con¬ 
ferring much more honor upon the landscape by 
looking at it, than ever the landscape can give them 
pleasure. This annual overflow of the continent with 
Cockneys is the point of Thackeray’s “ Kickleburys 
on the Rhine”—a picture whose breadth is hardly 
broader than the reality, and which requires you to 
be a traveller fully to enjoy. 

This was the pith of my chat with Willow as we 
sped along under the Palisades, and threaded the 
Highlands. 

Of course these comparisons soon led to the grand 
question which usually consumes the three hours 
from Murray-street to West Point—the comparative 
claims of interest in the rivers themselves. 

The first day upon the Rhine is an epoch in the 
traveller’s memory. I came out of the Tyrol through 
Southern Germany to Heidelberg, and on a brilliant 
July morning took the steamer at Mayence for Bop- 
part, a few miles above Coblentz, and not far below 
St. Goar. It was a soft, windless day. I lay in the 
very bow of the boat, with a Scotch boy going home 
for the summer from his school in Zurich. All day 
he buzzed in my ears stories of Switzerland and 
Scotland, and through his words I saw the misty and 
snowy grandeur of each. Our way was straight over 
the gleaming river, by the open spaces of Nassau 


16 


LOTUS-EATING. 


and the sunny slopes of the vineyards of the Schloss 
Johannisberger, through the narrow pass of Bingen, 
where the Highlands of the Rhine begin,—and under 
the Rudesheimer vines and the little castles, it still 
wound onward, every mile revealing the picture 
which fancy had so plainly seen, until in the late 
afternoon I stepped ashore at Boppart. 

On the other side of the river were the ruins of 
the twin castles of “The Brothers,” which every 
reader of Bulwer’s Pilgrims of the Rhine remembers, 
and crossing in a small boat at twilight, we climbed 
the conical hills and rambled and stumbled by moon¬ 
light among the ruins. The feeling of that evening 
was of the nameless sadness which is always born of 
moonlight in spots of romantic association. Yet it 
would not be possible to experience precisely the 
same thing upon any other than that river. The 
Rhine has its own character, its own romance ; and 
Uhland’s ballad with which I accompanied the slow 
dip of the oars, as at midnight we rowed homewards, 
is the music and the meaning of the Rhine. 

Many a year is in its grave, 

Since I crossed the restless wave, 

And the evening, fair as ever, 

Shines on ruin, rock, and river. 


Then, in this same boat, beside, 
Sat two comrades, old and tried; 


THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 


17 


One with all a father’s truth, 

One with all the fire of youth. 

One on earth in silence wrought, 

And his grave in silence sought, 

But the younger, brighter form, 

Passed in battle and in storm. 

So whene’er I turn my eye 
Back upon the days gone by, 

Saddening thoughts of friends come o’er me, 

Friends, who closed their course before me. 

Yet what binds us friend to friend 
But that soul with soul can blend? 

Soul-like were those hours of yore 
Let us walk in soul once more! 

Take, 0 boatman, thrice thy fee: ^ 

Take, I give it willingly, 

For, invisible to thee, 

Spirits twain have crossed with me. 

A few evenings afterward I was standing with a 
fellow-countryman upon the terrace of the castle of 
Heidelberg, looking out toward the glorious opening 
of the Neckar valley upon the plain of the Rhine, 
and was severely taken to task by him for my indis¬ 
creet Rhenish raptures and absolute light-speaking 
of the Hudson. 

“ Of course you don’t prefer the Rhine!” exclaimed 
my friend with patriotic ire. 

I contemplated the height of the terrace from the 
ground, and accommodated my answer to it. 

“ Yes ! { for this night only’ I think I do. But I 


18 


LOTUS-EA'IING. 


have no doubt I shall sleep it off. I am sure I shall 
be better in the morning.” 

Strange words they seemed of slight and scorn, 

My true-love sighed for sorrow, 

And looked me in the face, to think 
I thus could speak of Yarrow.” 

I did not sleep it off, however, that night, at least, 
for a day or two afterward I returned to the Rhine, 
and in my friend’s absence carried the question clear 
against the Hudson. 

The difference between the rivers is that of the 
countries. The Rhine is a narrow belt of turbid 
water winding among the vineyards that wall it upon 
each side. In its beautiful reach between Bingen 
and Bonn, the only beautiful part of the river, except 
near Lake Constance, it has no shores but vineyarded 
hillsides, and occasionally a narrow grain field in 
front of them. There are no trees, no varieties of 
outline, and the vines, regularly planted and kept 
short for wine, not left to luxuriate at length, for 
beauty, are a little formal in their impression. The 
castles—the want of which is so lamented upon the 
Hudson shores—are not imposing, but romantic. 
They are rather small and toy-like, and stand like 
small sentries upon small hills commanding the en¬ 
trances to small valleys. 

But they are interesting enough to make their own 


THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 


19 


traditions, even better than those yon read in Mur¬ 
ray’s red-book: and the mass of travellers who merely 
pass in the steamers, when the white glare of noon 
hardens the hills, as if they were sullen, and would 
not reveal their charms to a hasty stare, can have 
but faint idea of the tranquil and romantic beauty 
of the river. 

A river is the coyest of friends. You must love it 
and live with it before you can know it. 

“And you must love him, ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love.” 

The Rhine, after all, is the theme and mistress of 
romance and song—although to many of us, that 
fame be only traditional. The Rhine songs, both 
those which directly celebrate its beauty, and those 
which are ballads of life upon its banks, are among 
the most sonorous in the songful German literature. 

It is the Rhine wine, pure Rhenish, the blood of 
the life that blooms along these monotonous hillsides, 
which is the wine poetic, that routs all the temper¬ 
ance societies. The foliage of the vine itself is fair 
and lustrous. It wreathes the hot hills with a gor¬ 
geous garland, and makes the day upon the Rhine a 
festival. Then the old crumbling castles, if vague in 
fame, are so much the more suggestive, and from one 
shattered buttress to another, miles away on a dis- 


20 


LOTUS-EATING. 


tant hilltop, the gay vine-garland sweeps, alive now, 
as much as ever, and by the vivid contrast softens 
the suggestion and deepens the delight. 

Near St. Goar you glide under the rock of the 
Lorelei. Henry Heine in one of his tender songs 
relates its mournful tradition, which is the most 
beautiful and wildest of the Rhine. Willow and 
Xtopher and I sing it nightly as we lie on the lawn 
here, watching the moonlight streaming upon the 
river, and to-day Xtopher has translated it without 
letting the aroma escape. The first line of the last 
verse is hard to render. The verb in German ex¬ 
presses the river embracing the boat and sailor, like 
a serpent with its folds. 


I know not what it presages, 

This heart with sadness fraught, 
’T is a tale of the olden ages, 

That will not from my thought. 

The air grows cool and darkles, 

The Rhine flows calmly on, 

The mountain summit sparkles 
In the light of the setting sun. 

There sits in soft reclining 
A maiden wondrous fair, 

With golden raiment shining, 

And combing her golden hair. 

With a comb of gold she combs it, 
And combing, low singeth she, 

A song of a strange, sweet sadness, 
A wonderful melody. 


THE HUDSON AND THE KHINE. 


21 


The sailor shudders as o’er him, 

The strain comes floating by, 

He sees not the cliffs before him, 

He only looks on high. 

Ah! round him the dark waves flinging 
Their arms, draw him slowly down,— 
And this with her wild, sweet singing 
The Lorelei has done. 


Mendelssohn was to have written an opera upon 
this story and had already commenced it, but the 
king of Prussia, who is fond of the classics, ordered 
the composer, who was the royal director of music, 
to write an overture and chorusses for the Antigone. 
We have lost in that opera the companion of Don 
Giovanni; in a different.kind, of course, for Mozart 
was all melody, and Mendelssohn had only rhythm. 
In his music the melody is like a faint perfume in a 
dreamy south wind. How long must we wait for 
another Fne-ear to detect and interpret those weird 
melodies of the Lorelei ? 

These are the genuine delights of the Rhine. 
They are those of romantic association and sug¬ 
gestion. They are those which are only possible in 
an old and storied country. It is not what you see 
there, but what you feel through what you see, that 
charms you. The wild grape in our woods is pleas¬ 
ant from the association with the Rhenish vineyards, 
and they in turn from their association with the glory 


22 


LOTUS-EATING. 


of the grape in all literature and tradition. The 
Rhine is a lyric, or a ballad. 

Avoid the steamer, if you can, and in some coun¬ 
try market-boat float at evening or morning along 
its shores, following the wildest whim of fancy, with 
Uhland in one pocket and a flasche of Roidesheimer 
in the other, dozing away the noon in the coolest 
corner of some old ruin, and dreaming of Ariadne as 
you drift, sighing, beneath the moonlighted vine¬ 
yards. Then you, too, will exasperate some chance 
friend at Heidelberg, and believe in the Rhine, for 
that night only. 

I know that romance is in the poet’s heart, and 
not in the outward forms he sees. But there is a 
technical material of romance—the moonlight, a 
ruin, an Italian girl, for instance—which is useful in 
begetting a romantic mood of mind, as a quotation 
will often suggest verses that haunt you all day long. 
And it is in this material that the Rhine is so rich. 

The Hudson, however, is larger and grander. It 
is not to be devoured in detail. Ho region without 
association, is, except by science. But its spacious 
and stately character, its varied and magnificent 
outline, from the Palisades to the Catskill, are as 
epical as the loveliness of the Rhine is lyrical. The 
Hudson implies a continent behind. For vineyards 
it has forests. For a belt of water, a majestic stream. 


THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 


23 


For graceful and grain-goldened heights it has impos¬ 
ing mountains. There is no littleness about the Hud¬ 
son, but there is in the Rhine. Here every thing is 
boldly touched. What lucid and penetrant lights, 
what broad and sober shadows! The river moistens 
the feet, and the clouds anoint the heads, of regal 
hills. The Danube has, in parts, glimpses of such 
grandeur. The Elbe has sometimes such delicately 
pencilled effects. But no European river is so lordly 
in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea. 

Of all our rivers that I know, the Hudson, with 
this grandeur, has the most exquisite episodes. Its 
morning and evening reaches are like the lakes 
of dreams. Looking from this garden, at twilight, 
toward the huge hills, enameled 
with soft dark¬ 
ness, that guard 
the entrance of 
the Highlands, 
nearWestPoint, 

I “ would be a 
merman bold,” 
to float on the 
last ray through 
that mysterious 
gate to the soft- 




24 


LOTUS-EATING. 


est shadow in Cro’ Nest, where, if I were a merman 
bold, I should know the culprit fay was sleeping. 
Out of that dim portal glide the white sails of sloops, 
like spectres: they loiter languidly along the bases 
of the hills, as the evening breeze runs after them, 
enamored, and they fly, taking my fascinated eyes 
captive, far and far away, until they glimmer like 
ghosts and strand my sight upon the distance. 

These tranquil evening reveries are the seed of 
such beautiful and characteristic harvests as the 
Hudson tales of the Sketch Book and Knickerbock¬ 
er’s History. And rubbing those golden grains upon 
his eyes, Darley has so well perceived the spirit of 
the river, that in a few simple forms, in the vignette 
of his illustrations of Kip Yan Winkle, he has seized 
its suggestion and made it visible. Nor will any 
lover of the Hudson forget its poet, Joseph Kodman 
Drake, who in his “Culprit Fay,” shows that the 
spirits of romance and beauty haunt every spot upon 
which falls the poetic eye. If a man would touch 
the extremes of experience in a single day, I know 
not how it could be better done, than by stepping 
upon a steamer, after a long bustling morning in 
Wall-street, and reading the “ Culprit Fay” by 
moonlight upon the piazza of the hotel at West Point, 
looking up the river to Cro’ Nest. 

It was a happy fortune for the beauty of the river 


THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 25 

that steam did not drive away the sails. It was 
feared that the steamers would carry all the freight, 
and so bereave the river of the characteristic and 
picturesque life of the white-sailed sloops. But econ¬ 
omy was on the side of beauty this time, and it was 
found cheaper to carry heavy freights by sail, as of 
old. So the sloops doze and dream along, very 
beautiful to behold from the banks, and sometimes, 
awakened as they enter the Highlands by a sudden 
stoop from some saucy gust coquetting with the hills, 
they bend and dip, and come crowding toward us 
through the grim mountain gate,. like a troop of 
white-winged pilgrims fluttering and flying from the 
Castle of Giant Despair. 

You see I have heard the Hudson Syrens: per¬ 
haps some faint, far-off strain of that lullaby of 
silence that soothed old Rip to his mountain nap. 
And while I smell Florida and the Tropics, as I sit 
under the branching magnolia, it goes clear and 
clean against the Rhine. But when, leaving the 
garden, and sitting under the foliaged trellises of the 
piazza, we see the moon rise over the opposite moun¬ 
tains—the ghost of the summer day—drawing the 
outline of the Warwick vase more delicately in 
shadow upon the sward than ever the skilful artist 
carved it in marble, then a glimpse of Grecian 
beauty penetrates and purifies the night; while, 
B 


26 


LOTUS-EATING. 


within doors, Willow’s hands dream upon the keys 
of the piano, and singing, sad and sweet enough to 
silence the Lorelei, completes the discomfiture of the 
Rhine. 

In the moonlight and the music Xtopher and I are 
but 

“Such stuff as dreams are made of,” 

until 


“From tower on tree-top high, 

The sentry elf his call has made, 

A streak is in the eastern sky, 

Shapes of moonlight! flit and fade t 
The hill-tops gleam in morning’s spring, 

The sky-lark shakes his dappled wing, 

The day-glimpse glimmers on the lawn, 

The cock has crowed and the fays are gone i” 



C A T S K I L L. 








< 


II. 

(Cotskill. 

P 

July. J 
The Mountain House. $ 

he “New World” is a filagree 
frame-work oij^white wood sur¬ 
rounding a huge engine, which is 
much too conspicuous. I am 
speaking, by-the-by, of the 
Hudson steamer; and yet, 
perhaps, the symbol holds 
for the characteristic expression of the nation. For 
just so flimsy and overfine are our social arrange¬ 
ments, our peculiarities of manner and dress, and 
just so prominent and evident is the homely practical 
genius that carries us forward, with steam-speed, 
through the sloop-sluggishness of our compeers. 

A sharp-faced, thought-furrowed, hard-handed 
American, with his anxious eye and sallow complex¬ 
ion, his nervous motion and concentrated expression, 
and withal, accoutred for travelling in blue coat 
with gilt buttons, dark pantaloons, patent leather 



30 


LOTUS-EATING. 


boots, and silk vest hung with charms, chains, and 
bits of metal, as if the Indian love of lustre lingered 
in the Yankee, is not unlike one of these steamers, 
whose machinery, driving it along, jars the cut glass 
and the choice centre-tables and crimson-covered 
lounges, and with a like accelerated impetus, would 
shiver the filagree into splinters. 

Yet'for all this the “New World”'is a very pleas¬ 
ant place. It has a light, airy, open and clean deck, 
whence you may spy the shyest nook of scenery upon 
the banks, and^ spacious cabin, where you do not 
dine at a huge table, with eager men plunging their 
forks into dishes before you, and their elbows into 
your sides, but quietly and pleasantly as at a Parisian 
cafd. What an appalling ordeal an American table 
d’hote is! What a chaos of pickles, puddings and 
meats! and eac£ man plunging through every thing 
as if he and the steamer were racing for victory. 
The waiters, usually one third the necessary num¬ 
ber, rush up and down the rear of the benches, and 
cascades of gravies and sauces drip ominously along 
their wake. It is the seed-time of dyspepsia, and 
Dickens in that anti-American novel, which none of 
us can read without feeling its injustice, has yet de¬ 
scribed, only too well, an American ordinary. 

Who can wonder that we are lantern-jawed, lean, 
sickly and serious of aspect, when he has dined on a 


CATSKILL. 


31 


steamer or at a great business hotel? We laugh 
very loftily at the Khine dinners in which the pud¬ 
ding and fish meet in the middle of the courses. 
But a Rhine dinner upon the open, upper deck of the 
steamer, is quiet and orderly and inoffensive, while 
one of our gregarious repasts must needs offend every 
man who has some regard for proprieties and some 
self-respect. 

—And Catskill? 

Yes, we are rapidly approaching, even while we 
sit on deck and our eyes slide along the gentle green 
banks, as we meditate American manners and the 
extremes that meet in our characteristics. Beyond 
Poughkeepsie a train darts along the shore, rattling 
over the stones on the water’s edge, and rolling with 
muffled roar behind the cuts and among the heavy 
foliage. So nearly matched is our speed, that until 
the locomotive ran beside us, I did not knowhow 
rapid was our silent movement. But there is heat 
and bustle and dust in the nervous little train, which 
winds along, like a jointed reptile, while with our 
stately steamer there is silence, and the cool, con¬ 
stant patter of the few drops, where our sharp prow 
cuts the river. 

A little above Poughkeepsie the river bends, and 
the finest point is gained. It is a foreground of cul¬ 
tivated and foliaged hills of great variety of outline, 


32 


LOTUS-EATING. 


rising as they recede, and ranging, and towering at 
last along the horizon, in the Catskill mountains. It 
was a brilliant day, and the heavy, rounding clouds 
piled in folds along the line of the hills—taking, at 
length, precisely their own hue, and so walling up 
the earth with a sombre, vaporous rampart, such as 
Titans and fallen angels storm. As we glided 
nearer, keen flashes darted from the wall of cloud, 
and as if riven and rent with its sharpness, the heavy 
masses rolled asunder; then more heavily piled 
themselves in dense darkness, fold overlying fold, 
while the startled wind changed, and rushed down 
the river, chilled, and breathing cold before the storm. 

Ho longer a wall, but a swiftly advancing and de¬ 
vastating power, the storm threw up pile upon pile 
of jagged blackness into the clear, tender blue of the 
afternoon, and there was a wail in the hurried gusts 
that swept past us and over us, and the river curled 
more and more into sudden waves, which were foam- 
tipped, and scattered spray. 

"We were now abreast of the mountains, and far 
behind them the storm had burst. Down the vast 
ravines that opened outward toward the river, I saw 
the first softness of the shower skimming along the 
distant hillsides, moister and grayer, until they were 
merged in mist. Deep into those solemn mountain 
forests leaped the lightning, and the echo of its 


CATSKILL. 33 



wrathful roar surged and boomed among the hills, 
and dashed far up the cliffs and dark hemlock slopes, 
and crashed over the gurgling brooks, where was 
none to hear but the trees and the streams, and they 
were undismayed, and in the shuddering breeze of the 
pauses the trees rustled and whispered to the streams, 
and the streams laughed to themselves—the strange, 
sweet, mystical laughter that Undine laughed. 

“ They roll their nine-pins still, among the Cats- 
kill,” said Olde. 

“ And there’s a ten-strike,” interposed Swans- 
downe, as a mighty bolt burst among the hills, but 
still toward the inner valleys, for the slope toward 
the river yet stood in cold, dark, purple distinctness. 

The breeze was cool and strong as we landed at 

B* 



34 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Catskill. We were huddled ashore rapidly, the 
board was pulled in, and the “New World” disap¬ 
peared. I proposed riding up to the Mountain House 
on the outside of the coach, but Olde smiled and 
said, a I shall go inside.” 

How Olde loves scenery as well as any man, poet 
or painter, but he holds that a drenching rain de¬ 
stroys both the beauty of the scene and the capacity 
for enjoyment of the seer, and while I stood with my 
hand upon the door, my common sense thoroughly 
convinced, as well by his action as by his words, but 
my carnal heart lusting after the loveliness of the 
cloud-crowned and shower-veiled mountains, there 
came another ten-strike that suddenly shook a cloud 
to pieces over our heads and down it came. 

“ I think I shall go inside, too,” said I, as I stum¬ 
bled up the steps and closed the door. 

During the first eight miles of the inland drive 
toward the Mountain House, I enjoyed the prospect 
of six travellers, four stained leather curtains, and 
the two wooden windows of the door. It was not 
cool inside the coach, but without, the wind was in 
high frolic with the rain, and through the slightest 
crevice the wily witch dashed us with her missiles, 
cold and very wet. Then the showers swept along a 
little, and we threw up the curtains and breathed 
ftesh air, and about three miles from the Mountain 


CATSKILL. 


35 

House, where the steep ascent commences, Olde and 
Swansdowne and I jumped out of the stage and 
walked. The road is very firmly built, and is fortu¬ 
nate in its material of a slaty rock, and in the luxu¬ 
riance of foliage, for the tangled tree-roots hold the 
soil together. 

The road climbs at first in easy zigzags, and pres¬ 
ently pushes straight on through the woods, and 
upon the side of a steep ravine; the level-branched 
foliage sheering regularly down, sheeting the moun¬ 
tain side with leafy terraces. Between the trunks 
and down the gorges we looked over a wide but 
mountainous landscape, and as we ascended, the air 
became more invigorating with the greater height 
and the coolness of the shower. Two hours before 
sunset we stood upon the plateau before the Moun¬ 
tain House, 2,800 feet above the sea. 

There is a fine sense of height there, but all moun¬ 
tain views over a plain are alike. You stand on the 
piazza of the Mountain House and look directly down 
into the valley of the Hudson, with only a foreground, 
deep beneath you, of a lower layer than that on 
which you stajid, with its precipice of pine and hem¬ 
lock. The rest stretches then, a smooth surface to 
the eye, but hilly enough to the feet, when you are 
there, to an unconfined horizon at the north and 
south, and easterly to the Berkshire hills. 


36 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Through this expanse lies the Hudson, not very 
sinuous, but a line of light dividing the plain. In 
the vague twilight atmosphere it was very effective. 
Sometimes the mist blotted out individual outlines, 
and the whole scene was but a silver-gray abyss, 
and the hither line of the river was the horizon, 
and the stream itself a white gleam of sky beyond. 
Then the distance and the foreground were mingled 
in the haze, a shining opaque veil, wherein the 
river was a rent, through which beamed a remote 
brightness. Or the vapors clustered toward the 
south and the stream flowed into them, flashing 
and far, as into a terrene cloud-land. All the coun¬ 
try was chequered with yellow patches of ripe grain, 
and marked faintly with walls and fences, and 
looked rather a vast domain than a mountain-ruled 
landscape. 

Whoever is familiar with mountain scenery will 
know what to anticipate in the Catskill view. The 
whole thing is graceful and generous, but not sub¬ 
lime. Your genuine mountaineer (which I am not) 
shrugs his shoulder at the shoulders of mountains 
which soar thousands of feet above hijn and are still 
shaggy with forest. He draws a long breath over 
the spacious plain, but he feels the want of that true 
mountain sublimity, the presence of lonely snow- 
peaks. 


CATSKILL. 


37 


And as we always require in scenery of a similar 
class, similar emotions, there is necessarily a little 
disappointment in the Catskill. They are hills rather 
than mountains. But, as they have the fame of 
mountains, you are recalling your Alpine impres¬ 
sions, all the way up. It is not very wise, perhaps, 
but it is very natural and rather unavoidable. Yet, 
when the night falls, the silence and coolness of your 
lofty home, impart the genuine mountain tone to 
your thoughts. Then you begin to acknowledge the 
family resemblance, and to remember Switzerland. 

When I was on the Faulhorn, the highest point 
in Europe upon which a dwelling-house is placed, 
and that inhabited for three months only in the year, 
I stepped out in the middle of the night, and as I 
looked across the valley of Grindelwald and saw the 
snow-fields and ice-precipices of all the Horns — 
never trodden and never to be trodden by man— 
shining cold in the moonlight, my heart stood still 
as I felt that those awful peaks and I were alone in 
the solemn solitude. Then I felt the significance of 
Switzerland, and knew the sublinlity of mountains 

And do you remember, said Olde, how deli¬ 
cately the dawn touched those summits with cool, 
bright fingers, and how their austerity burned and 
blushed under that caressing, until the sunrise over¬ 
whelmed them with rosy flame, and they flashed 


38 


LOTUS-EATING. 


perfect day far over Switzerland; and hours after¬ 
ward, when day was old upon the mountain tops, 
how gentlemen-travellers turned in their beds in the 
valley inns, and said, “ Hallo, Tom, the sun is 
rising ?” 

The Mountain House is really unceremonious. 
You are not required to appear at dinner in ball 
costume, and if you choose, you may scramble to the 
Falls in cowhide boots and not in varnished pumps. 
The house has a long and not ill-proportioned Corin¬ 
thian colonnade, wooden of course, and glaring white. 
The last point, how T ever, is a satisfaction from below, 
for its vivid contrast with the dark green forest re¬ 
veals the house from a great distance upon the river. 
The table is well supplied, but Olde and Swansdowne 
were forced to throw themselves upon the compassion 
of the chambermaid, (I would say Femme-de- Chambre, 
if a single eye, slopping shoes, and a thick, cotton 
handkerchief pinned night-cap-wise over the head, 
would possibly allow that suggestive word,) and to 
submit that a towel of the magnitude of a small 
mouchoir , (they did not say mouchoir ,) was not large 
allowance for two full-grown men. The dame’s an¬ 
swer had gravity and instance. 

“ Gentlemen, how can I give you what we have 
not?” 

A written placard around the house announced 


CATSKILL. 


39 


that dancing music could be had at the bar. But 
none wished to polk—and how music could be made 
in that parlor, which seemed to have been dislocated 
by some tempestuous mountain ague, remains a mys¬ 
tery to me. There are eight windows, and none of 
them opposite to any of the others; folding-doors 
which have gone down the side of the room in some 
wild architectural dance, and have never returned, 
and a row of small columns stretching in an inde¬ 
pendent line across the room, quite irrespective of 
the middle. It is a dangerous parlor for a nervous 
man. 

We sat on the edge of the precipice, looking off 
into the black abyss of night. Swansdowne told wild 
tales of crazy men in lonely nooks of Scotland, and 
Olde talked of Italy. They were pleasant days, he 
said, which.shall return no more. 

“ My eyes are full of childish tears, 

My heart is idly stirred, 

For the same sound is in my ears, 

That in those days I heard. 

“ Thus fares it still in our decay, 

And yet the wiser mind 
Mourns less for what age takes away 
That what it leaves behind.” 








■ 













































































CAT SKILL FALLS. 




Cfltskill /nils 



July. 

did not see the 
sun rise from 
the Catskill. 
Therefore my 
more cun¬ 


ning way 
would be to 
give you a 
florid history 
of all the sunrises that I 
have seen from famous 
omitting mention of the 
.^''chills, yawns, and, in general, very 
. ameliorated admiration of such early 
•' spectacles. 

Quite unwittingly I was conscious of 
no sunrise that bright Sunday morning 


44 


LOTUS-EATING. 


upon the Catskill; yet I was not scornful of it but 
only sleepy. 

JSTot scornful, for still flashes along the heights of 
memory many it Swiss sunrise. That of the Righi, 
for instance, with the groups of well-whiskered Eng¬ 
lishmen and well-booted Americans, gathered upon 
the Culm, and wrapt in coats, cloaks, blankets, and 
.comforters—as if each had arisen, bed and all, and 
had so stepped out to enjoy the spectacle. A wooden 
horn was blown, much vague sentiment was uttered, 
and the exceeding absurdity of the-crowd interfered 
with the grandeur of the moment. 

But beyond these and above them were the peaks 
of the Mid-Alps, celestial snow-fields, smooth and 
glittering as the sky, and the rugged glaciers sloping 
into unknown abysses, Niagaran cataracts frozenKin 
foam forever. There were lesser mountains in the 
undulating mass of the panorama, green and grace¬ 
ful, or angular with sharp cliffs, sheering perpendic¬ 
ularly away, or gently veering into the glassy calm¬ 
ness of cold lakes, in which the night had bathed* 
and left its blackness. There was the range of 
the Jura, dusky and far, and the faint flash of 
the Aar in the morning mist, and among these aw¬ 
ful mountains, and upon them, spots of fame, po¬ 
etic and patriotic, each one the home of a thousand 
traditions, each the melody of myriad household 


CATSKILL FALLS. 


45 


song’s. It was the region of William Tell all around 
me. 

The keen, cool breath of early morning smote me, 
as with the heroic spirit of the story, and the senti¬ 
ments and memories of the spot brightened into sig¬ 
nificance with the increasing dawn. And as we stood 
there, too shivering tfc be sentimental—for the breath 
which lives “ with death and morning on the silver 
horns,” blew every feeling away that was not gen¬ 
uine and fair—far over the hushed tumult of peaks 
which thronged to the utmost east, came the sun, 
sowing those sublime snow-fields with glorious day. 
The light leaped from peak to peak, the only thing 
alive, glad and gay, worthy to sport with those 
worthy mates, until the majestic solemnity of the mo¬ 
ment yielded to the persuaUve warmth of day, and 
our hearts yearned for the valley. 

Do you remember in Tennyson’s “ Princess,” the 
“small, sweet idyl,” which she read? 

Come down, 0 maid, from yonder mountain height; 

What pleasure lives in height, (the shepherd sang,) 

In height and cold, the splendor of the hills 1 
But cease to move so near the heavens, and cease 
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine, 

' To sit a star upon the sparkling spire, 

And come, for Love is of the valley, come, 

For Love is of the valley, come thou down, 

And find him by the happy threshold, he, 

Or hand in hand with plenty in the maize, 

Or red with spurted purple of the vats, 


46 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Or fox-like in the vine; nor cares to walk 
With Death and Morning on the Silver Horns; 

Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine, 

Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice, 

That huddling slant in furrow cloven falls, 

To roll the torrent out of dusky doors: 

But follow: let the torrent dance thee down, 

To find him in the valley; let the wild 
Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave 
The monstrous ledges there to st^pe, and spill 
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, 

That like a broken purpose waste in air: 

So waste not thou: but come; for all the vales 
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth 
Arise to thee; ‘the children call, and I 
Thy shepherd, pipe, and sweet is every sound, 

Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; 

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 

And murmuring of innumerable bees. 

Remembering these things, when I came down and 
found Olde and Swansdowne under the Corinthian 
colonnade, I did not feel as if I had seen nothing, 
although I had lost the Catskill sunrise, which, they 
told me, was a magnificent effect of slanting light 
over a level floor of fleecy clouds, much more mag¬ 
nificent, indeed, than any polar ocean could be, ex¬ 
cept those that poets see. 

It was a clear, crystal morning; and after break¬ 
fast those who were disposed, repaired to the village 
of Catskill, twelve miles away, to church. I believe 
there were not very many. Some of the rest of us 
looked mountain ward. The more distant hills—for 


CATSKILL FALLS. 


47 


there are none lost in mist so far as to seem most 
distant — were sharply drawn, purply cold, and 
rounded with foliage up the sides. Over the sum¬ 
mit we went, and down the purple glen, toward the 
throbbing heart of the Catskill. 

“ And on that morning thro’ the grass, 

And by the steaming rills, 

We travelled merrily to pass 
A day among the hills.” 

The road to the Falls is most unromantically dis¬ 
tinguishable. A coach load was to follow, but we 
scorned coaches—mighty mountaineers that we were ! 
and went cheerily along past the lake, dark and cold 
enough to have a dreary tradition, while the vibrant, 
liquidly-gurgling song of the wood-thrush poured 
through the trees, and a solitary, flaming golden-rod 
nodded autumn to us as we passed. It is a walk 
through the woods—a wood-road to a finger-post that 
says curtly, “To the Falls;” and then down into a 
dell to a very new and very neat white house and a 
bar-room, with a balcony over the abyss. 

The proprietor of the bar-room is also the ‘genius 
of the Fall, and drives a trade both with his spirits 
and his water. In fact, if your romantic nerves can 
stand the steady truth, the Catskill Fall is turned on 
to accommodate poets and parties of pleasure. 

The process of “ doing” the sight, for those who 


48 


LOTUS-EATING. 


are limited in time, is very methodical. You leave 
the hotel and drive.in a coach to the bar-room. You 
“refresh.” You step out upon the balcony, and look 
into the abyss. The proprietor of the Fall informs 
you that the lower plunge is eighty feet high. It ap¬ 
pears to you to be about ten. You laugh incredu¬ 
lously—he smiles in return the smile of a mens con - 
scia recti. “Would you step down and have the 
water turned on?” You do step down a somewhat 
uneven but very safe staircase. You reach the bot¬ 
tom. “ Look! now it comes!” and the proud cascade 
plunges like a freed force into the air and slips, 
swimming in foam, away from your gaze. 

You would gladly stay all day. But the sage of 
the party looks at his watch—remembers dinner— 
deems it time to think of returning; and you climb 
the staircase—step upon the balcony—throw a last 
look into the abyss—down the blue mistiness of the 
winding valley whose repose leads your thought far 
into eternal silence and summer, and mounting the 
coach you are boxed up again and delivered at the 
Mountain House just as the dinner-bell rings. 

This is ludicrous. But most of us are really only 
shop-keepers, and natural spectacles are but shop- 
windows on a great scale. People love the country 
theoretically, as they do poetry. Yery few are heroic 
enough to confess that it is wearisome, even when 


CATSKILL FALLS. 


49 


they are fatigued by it. The reason of which reluct¬ 
ance I suppose to be a lurking consciousness that we 
ought to love it, that we ought to be satisfied and 
glad among the hills and under the trees, and that if 
we are not, it is because the city has corrupted us— 
because the syren has sung away our strength. The 
distaste which many clever persons feel for Words¬ 
worth, may often be traced to a want of sympathy 
with his intense and personal enjoyment of nature. 
It is incredible to them, and seems inflated if not false. 

This want of direct pleasure and exhilaration in 
nature is a matter of regret, as would be the want of 
love for flowers. A man who has it is never friend¬ 
less. The wildest or rarest day flushing the land¬ 
scape with its own character, is his companion and 
his counsellor. “ The mountains are a feeling,” the 
streams are books that babble without nonsense, and 
the coming and going of the year, as he marks it 
upon the budding and fading leaf, is the swelling 
and dying of celestial music in his heart. Happily 
no man is always insensible. He cannot always es¬ 
cape the electrical shock of natural grandeur and 
beauty. A noble landscape, a cataract, a mountain, 
impresses him imperially, but as vaguely and blind¬ 
ly as a great hero surprises pedlers and pettifoggers. 

Olde and Swansdowne and I, citizens too, de¬ 
scended the perpendicular staircase to the rock pave- 
C 




50 


LOTUS-EATING. 


ment, which, hollowed into a basin in the centre, 
receives the first long fall. You may picture the 
general effect of the scene from below by fancying a 
mountain stream followed up the natural valley be¬ 
tween two mountains, until it is checked by an 
abrupt rocky precipice, stretching from one hillside 
to the other directly across the ravine, and half-con- 
cavely pointing down the valley. Directly over the 
centre of the parapet of this rocky wall flows the 
Fall. At first it is only the surplus of a dammed 
mill-stream, (I beg pardon,) but beyond the mill and 
the dam, nature has claimed her own again, and 
reels the slight stream away, a thread of airy silver, 
wreathing into rainbow spray. 

Indeed, so slight is the Fall, when not turned on, 
but only dripping through the gate, that there is but 
a single shoot of watery arrows in Indian file, an 
appearance which any observer of cascades will un¬ 
derstand. It is about the volume of the Swiss Staub- 
bach, when it has fallen some four hundred of its 
nine hundred feet toward the green lawns of Lauter- 
brunnen, which it moistens as spray and never 
reaches as a fall, except during a “ spell of weather,” 
the dissolution of spring, or some other time unseen 
of Dr. Syntax, and the hunters of the picturesque. 

The first effect of the Catskill Fall is very simple 
and beautiful. Seen from the highest platform, 


OATSKILL FALLS. 


51 


after you have descended and are looking up, it has 
a quiet grandeur, even, which declines into pictu¬ 
resqueness when you pass below the second broken 
fall that pours away into the gorge, whence it steals 
off, singing, between the heavily wooded hillsides. 
The great rock, over which flows the first fall, is 
hollowed out, a little above the level of the basin 
into which it plunges, and you can walk, stooping a 
little, quite around and behind the thin, flickering 
fall. It has a delicate spray of its own, too, when 
the wind scatters it into the sunlight which touches 
it into diamond dust; and very gracious was the 
sun that morning, for when, after our arrival below, 
the coaches arrived above, and the parties descend¬ 
ed, the ladies glided and shrank along under the 
rock—a motley troop of white ladies of Avenel, if 
you will, except that for her the fall parted, and she 
did not stoop but droop—and as they came around, 
where the wind had waved the cascade in spray to 
cool them, the sun flashed suddenly from behind 
the fleecy clouds, and arched them with a rain¬ 
bow. What could the Catskill do more for them, 
since it could not part like the Fall of Avenel, 
and frame them in living silver, as they passed 
beneath ? 

They all came down to the level of the second fall, 
and there, clustered upon the rocks, we awaited the 


52 


LOTUS-EATING. 


“ turning on,” or rather the artificial spring and imi¬ 
tative effects of snow-melting upon the mountains, 
produced by our friend of the “Refreshment Sa¬ 
loon,” whose little building perched upon the cliff, 
at the very point of the fall, with its friendly basket 
far overhanging the ravine upon an outstretched 
pole, like that of an old well, is extremely effective 
and recalls vaguely those desert convents from whose 
high walls hang baskets, the sole communication 
with the world, except through posterns bolted and 
barred. 



The fall swelled suddenly, and 
in a moment, a downward vol¬ 
ley of flashing arrows of light, 
plunged into the basin beneath. 
It flaked into spray as it fell, 
yj and sheeted the basin near it 


with foam, and the mist 
^.steamed up into the concave 
? abyss, and clouded it, as if to 
XVeil the fall in its most majestic 
* moment. It was of the same 
character still, but developed in- 
^ to fulness; and the second fall, pouring 
over a crescent of rock brilliantly greened with grass 
and light foliage, and of picturesquely broken outline, 
overflowed at crevices and points unseen before, and 


CATSKILL FALLS. 


53 


a graceful group of rills danced attendance upon 
each side of the chief fall. 

Down to the basin of this we descended, and com¬ 
manded both cascades. But my pen commands no 
colors, and the neutral tint of words will not glow 
with the flashing water and the rich, serious green 
of the banks of foliage, nor seize the movement of 
the clouds—June clouds, that swam fleecily back¬ 
ward directly over the cascade, adding the sympathy 
of motion in the moist blue sky to that of the falling 
water. This was a rare and exquisite effect. The 
round, white clouds hung low, and as they swept 
swiftly backward, seemed to pass through the very 
narrow dent of rock which the cascade had worn, as 
if its own spray had curled into compact clouds, and 
was so hurrying back again to feed the fountain. 

The groups of loiterers exhausted words but not 
delight, and after resting a little upon the rocks, 
climbed the cliff again homeward. We lingered be¬ 
low. Swansdowne with rapid pencil was traciug the 
general outline of the appearance of the full fall. 
Olde and I were lying at length gossiping of Switz¬ 
erland, and watching the shifting splendors of the 
day, and the fall, as the gate was closed, gradually 
dwindled, wasting from that full-bodied maturity, 
and sinking again into infantine weakness and un¬ 
certainty. 


54 


LOTUS-EATING. 


There is a feeling of life in moving water, and the 
poets call it living water, when it flows freshly and 
clear. Therefore, we could not watch it, as if pining 
away, without a little regret, not at the loss of our 

own pleasure, but at its loss of life. Its song in the 

* 

ravine behind us grew fainter, subsiding at last into 
a uniform, gentle gurgling. Whether a solitary in 
a slouched hat upon the hillside below us, with tab¬ 
lets in hand, was measuring that murmur into verse 
I shall never know. But certainly the music of the 
song I shall never forget. 

Sunday stillness brooded over the day. Sweet 
and sacred it was like the memory of George Her¬ 
bert, and his was the hymn we sang that Sunday at 
the Catskill Falls. 

Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright; 

The bridal of the earth and sky: 

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; 

For thou must die. 

Sweet rose! whose hue, angry and brave, 

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; 

Thy root is ever in its grave;— 

And thou must die. 

Sweet Spring! full of sweet days and roses; 

A box where sweets compacted lie; 

My music shows ye have your closes:— 

And all must die. 

Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 

Like seasoned timber never gives: 


CATSKILL FALLS. 


55 


But, though the whole world turn to coal, 

Then chiefly lives. 

We walked down the stream for a mile after¬ 
wards, and I advise every one to do the same, crossing 
at the usual place, and stumbling over the rocks a 
little at first, but at last pushing smoothly on. The 
path leads you to a pleasant opening where the 
water polishes a broad pavement, and where bits of 
the picturesque abound. With his delicately sensi¬ 
tive artistic eye, Swansdowne glanced among the 
trees, and from time to time, announced “a Iven- 
sett,” as a broad bit of mossed rock, or a shapely 
stretch of trees with the mountain outline beyond, 
recalled the poetic accuracy and characteristic sub¬ 
jects of that artist. 

And so, finding the stones, poems and prctures, as 
well as sermons, we voted, of course, to finish the 
day at the Fall. A neat and well-cooked dinner in 
the very small and clean new house near the pictu¬ 
resque bar-room, (seen from below,) consoled us for 
the loss of the Mountain House ordinary, and, as we 
dined, a wind furious enough for November, a very 
cataract of a wind, dashed and swept along the 
mountain-sides, and Swansdowne and I did privately 
shiver, (it was the 20th of July,) until we sallied 
forth and clomb down the rock again to the first 
platform. 


56 


LOTUS-EATING. 


The water was unchained for us, and the lilies in 
the extremest depths of the ravine that grow beyond 
the edge of the usual flowing, were folded once more 
before sunset in its crystal caresses. The western 
light streaming up the ravine was of tenderer tone 
than that of morning, and our thoughts grew tender¬ 
er too. Our chat was of Italy now, no longer of 
Switzerland, and the tranquil sunset closed over a 
day that will sing as pleasantly through memory as 
the stream through the solitary dell. 


“To-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new.’ 





TRENTON. 




C * 







IY. 



July. 

[Sjwn Longfellow’s delicious proem to the 
he invokes the singing of a song 
of rest. Sometimes, urges the 
poet, let us escape the battle cry 
and the bugle call, and repose 
that we may the better wrestle. 

Such songs have power to quiet 
The restless pulse of care, 

And come like the benediction 
That follows after prayer. 

Trenton is that summer song of rest. 

Only lovely images haunt its remembrance, beau¬ 
tiful as the Iris which, in some happy moment of the 
ramble through the ravine, spans the larger or lesser 
fall. Beauty and grace are its praises. You hear 
them from those who are either hurrying to the 
grandeur of Niagara, or from those who, return¬ 
ing, step aside at Utica to enjoy the music of the 





60 


LOTUS-EATING. 


greater cataract, softened here at Trenton into an 
exquisite echo. 

It matters little when you see these Falls, whether 
before or after Niagara. The charm of Trenton is 
unique, and you will not scorn the violets and lilies 
because you knelt to the passion-flowers and roses. 
In the prime of a summer which, from the abundant 
rains, is singularly unworn and unwithered, a day 
at Trenton, because of its rare and picturesque, but 
harmonious, attractions, is like a feast of flowers. In 
some choic^ niche of memory you will lay it aside, 
not as a sublime statue nor a prophetic and solemn 
picture, but as a vase most delicate, symmetrical if 
slight, and chased with pastoral tracery. 

From Albany—its Campagna-like suburbs once* 
passed—a pleasant day made pleasant pictures of 
the broad, rich, tranquil landscape. The country 
gained, possibly, in tenderness of aspect that I 
glanced at it in the intervals of reading Hawthorne’s 
u Seven Gables,” and as the heat increased, the mo¬ 
notonous clatter of the cars grew soothing as the airy 
harpsichord of the fair Alice, dead centuries ago, and 
persuaded my mind into Clifford’s vague and dreamy 
mood. Floating thus along the fascinating verge of 
slumber, I opened my eyes upon the placid pictu¬ 
resqueness of the actual landscape, and anon closed 
them to behold, instantly, the enchanted scenery of 


TRENTON. 


61 


sleep. It was a meet approach to Trenton, a passage 
through a dream-frescoed corridor, pierced with win¬ 
dows that looked into the real world. In every gar¬ 
den, as we hurried on, wherever was an old tree and 
a hint of the “moated grange,” (they are not many 
on that railroad,) I looked to see the soft-souled Clif¬ 
ford, Alice Pyncheon, and the high-hearted Hepzi- 
bah, seated in the shadow and wondering at the 
world. 

But when the petulant bell rang two o’clock at 
Utica, dreams vanished, and I emerged into a crowded 
and confused station, and was whirled among por¬ 
ters, luggage, barrows, rival coachmen, bells, gongs, 
and steam, to the hotel. The regular coach to Tren¬ 
ton had left upon the arrival of the preceding train, 
but there were several white-hatted individuals of 
extremely conciliatory and persuasive manners, who 
launched instantly into extravagant praises of various 
stages, wagons, and other carriages, all offering the 
most delightful and easy method of reaching the 
Falls. 

But it was singular to an inquiring mind to remark 
that whenever you descended to particulars, as to 
hours, and numbers, and carriages, these romances 
instantly reeled away into the most astonishing 
vagueness, and while you fancied one moment that 
you heard the noise of the fall, the next it was a 


62 


LOTUS-EATING. 


very indistinguishable and quite inaudible object 
in the vista of a prolonged perspective. The fact 
was that these men who manifested so laudable 
an interest in your getting to Trenton, comfortably 
and speedily, wished only to secure your promise to 
go, and would a arrange” afterward. Remember 
that when you come, and act accordingly. 

It was clear that nothing could be done until after 
dinner, which was despatched, and while I quietly 
consumed a noxious weed, and patiently awaited my 
prospects, a short, thick-set, English-looking gentle¬ 
man crossed the passage and suggested to my fancy 
that “Two horsemen might have been seen slowly 
mounting a hill.” But before I proceeded further in 
the natural reflections of the moment, my co-Trentoni- 
ans appeared in the shape of a party of twelve ; just a 
coach-load with their luggage, and my own coach- 
prospects began to dwindle dolefully. Then came 
the tug of war, and truly “ no pent-up Utica” con¬ 
tracted the powers of those rival coach-agents, for I 
never heard so sharp a struggle for a freight. 

The landlord was forced to interfere, while I and 
the “two horsemen” stood aside,—I, for my part, 
wincing at every moment of the tranquil summer 
afternoon wasted from Trenton. Presently there was 
a lull in the war, but no victory, and when a quiet 
man led me quietly aside, and asked my views of a 


TRENTON. 


63 


little open wagon, and a separate and rapid drive to 
Trenton, I found they entirely coincided with his, 
and within a few moments I was rolling across the 
spacious, sunny plain of the Mohawk. 

But mark the chances of life, nor dream of doing 
“ an old stager.” My private conveyance, the quiet 
suggestion of my quiet man, was the property of 
the very agent who had first accosted me, and who, 
as I thought, had dropped me from mind as a mere 
single passenger. Hot he. Given, a party of twelve 
together, on the one hand, and a party ot one upon 
the other, to furnish a coach to the first, at $—! and 
a wagon to the other, at $—! ! was his problem, 
and it was solved. Genius had made this man an 
emperor of nations; fate had placed him in author¬ 
ity over horses and hunters of the picturesque. 

My charioteer was a fine boy of sixteen. He 
whipped along over the plank-road, and gossipped of 
the horses, the people, and the places we passed. 
He was sharp-eyed and clear-minded—a bright boy, 
who may one day be President. As we were slowly 
climbing the hill— 

“Have you heard Jenny Lind, Sir?” inquired my 
Antinous of the stables. 

“Yes, often.” 

“ Great woman, Sir. Don’t you think so ?” 

“Ido.” 


64 


LOTUS-EATING. 


“ She was here last week, Sir.—Get-up, Charlie!’ 

“ Did you hear her ?” I asked. 

“Yes, Sir, and I drove with her to the Falls—that 
is, Tom Higgins drove, but I sat on the box.” 

“And was she pleased?” 

“Yes, Sir; only when she was going to see the 
falls, every body in the hotel ran to the door to look 
at her, so she went back to her room, and then 
slipped out of the back door. But the*re was some¬ 
thing better than that, Sir.” 

“ What was that?”— 

“She gave Tom Higgins fifty dollars when he 
drove her back. But there was something still bet¬ 
ter than that, Sir— 

“ Indeed ! what was that ?” 

“ Why, Sir, as we came back, we passed a little 
wood, and she stopped the carriage, and stepped out 
with the rest of the party, and me and Tom Higgins, 
and went into the wood. It was towards sunset and 
the wood was beautiful. She walked about a little, 
and picked up flowers, and sung, like to herself, as 
if it were pleasant. By-and-by she sat down upon 
a rock and began to sing aloud. But before she 
stopped, a little bird came and sat upon the bough 
close by us. I saw it, Sir, with my own eyes, the 
whole of it—and when Jenny Lind had done, he be¬ 
gan to sing and shout away like she did. While he 


TRENTON. 


65 


was singing she looked delighted, and when he 
stopped she sang again, and—oh! it was beautiful, 
Sir. But the little bird wouldn’t give it up, and he 
sang again, but not until she had done. Then Jenny 
Lind sang as well as ever she could. Her voice 
seemed to fill the woods all up with music, and when 
it was over, the little bird was still a while, but tried 
it again in a few moments. He could n’t do it, Sir. 
He sang very bad, and then the foreign gentlemen 
with Jenny Lind laughed, and they all came back 
to the carriage.” 

We had left the plank-road and were approaching 
the hotel at the falls through fine maple woods. It 
was pleasant to hear the boy’s story. Was it a poor 
prelude to Trenton? I had not dreamed that the 
romance of the Poet’s Lute and the Nightingale 
should be native to Oneida county no less than to 
Greece, and that its poet should be my callow chario¬ 
teer, who may one day be president. When I sat at 
my window afterward and in the fading twilight 
looked over the maple woods, and heard the murmur 
of Trenton Falls, I wondered if the bird ever reached 
its nest, or was found dead in the woods without a 
gun-shot wound. 

There is no better hotel than that at Trenton. It 
is spacious, and clean, and comfortable, and the table 
justifies its fame. Moreover, it is painted dark and 


66 


LOTUS-EATING. 


not white, and stands very modestly on the edge of 
the woods that overhang the ravine of the Falls. 
Modestly, although it is high, for the glaring, white 
caravanseries, our summer peaces of pleasure, wear 
the flaunting aspect of being no better than they 
should be. Happy were we, were they always as 
good! 

Poets’ fancies only, should image the Falls, they 
are so rich and rare a combination of quiet pictu¬ 
resqueness of beauty, and a sense of resistless force 
in the rushing waters. You descend from a lofty 
wood into a long, rocky chasm, which the Germans 
would call a Grund, for it is not a valley. It is 
walled and pavemented with smooth rocks, and the 
thronging forest fringes the summit of the wall. 
Over this smooth pavement slips the river, in those 
long, swift, still, foamless bounds, which vividly 
figure the appalling movement of a titanic serpent. 
The chasm almost closes up the river, and you see a 
foamy cascade above. Then, as if the best beauty 
and mystery were beyond, you creep along a narrow 
ledge in the rockside of the throat of the gorge, the 
water whirling and bubbling beneath, and reach the 
first large Fall. A slight spray enfolds you as a bap¬ 
tism in the spirit of the place. A broad ledge of the 
rock here offers firm and sufficient foothold while 
you gaze at the Falls. Before you is a level parapet 


TRENTON. 


67 



of 

sliding very shallowly over the 
broad bed above, concentrates 
mainly at one point for a fall, and 
plunges in a solid amber sheet. 

Close by the side of this you climb, 
and pass along the base of the overhang¬ 
ing mountain, and stooping under the foot of an im¬ 
perial cliff, stand before the great Fall, which has 
two plunges, a long one above, from which the river 
sheers obliquely over a polished floor of rock, and 
again plunges. The river bends here, and a high, 
square, regular bank projects from the cliff, smooth 
as a garden terrace, and perpetually veiled and soft- 




68 


LOTUS-EATING. 


ened by the spray. It is one of the most beautiful 
and boldest points in the long ravine, and when the 
late light of afternoon falls soft upon it, there is a 
strange contrast in your feelings as visions of Boc- 
cacio’s garden mingle with the wildness of American 
woods. 

Upon the cliff above this great Fall is a little house 
where the weary may rest, and those who find 
“water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink,” 
may pledge the spirit of Trenton, in that kind, if not 
that quality, of nectar which Boccacio himself would 
have desired. Here, under the densely-foliaged trees 
sit musing above the Fall, and watch the broad stream 
concentrate as it nears the verge; and then from the 
deep dark indigo of the pool collected there, see it 
pour itself away, a fall of brilliant amber, into the 
light streaming warmly from the west up the ravine. 
As you, musing, gaze, your own fancy will flow from 
the sombreness of serious thought, and pour itself 
away in a spray of romance and reverie, far through 
the golden gloom of the past and the bright-hued 
hope of the future that streams toward you like the 
light from the west. 

You will recall the European falls of fame; you 
will hear once more the glad Yelino “cleave the 
wave-worn precipice,” and mark the dark eyes of 
Italian girls, who steal to your side as you listen, 


TRENTON. 


69 


and say, as if the dark eyes whispered it, “ un bai - 
occlio , Signore” You will see the Sibylline temple, 
high-crowning the cliff at Tivoli, and once more, over 
the sea-surface, but silent and motionless, of the 
Campagna, your eye will rest upon St. Peter’s dome, 
rising mountain-like from the plain, and Beatrice 
d’Este will glide a pallid phantom, along the marble¬ 
doored, cypress-gloomed terraces of the villa. The 
thousand Alpine cascades of Switzerland will flicker 
through your memory, slight avalanches of snow- 
dust, shimmering into rainbow-mist, and the Rhine, 
beneath your back window in the hotel at Schaff- 
hausen, will plunge once more over its little rocky 
barrier, sending its murmur far into the haunted 
depths of the Black Forest beside you. Or, farther 
and fainter still, the rapids of the Nile and the rills 
of Lebanon will rush and gurgle, as you did not 
dream to hear them again, nor will your fancy rest 
until it sinks in the oriental languor of the banks of 
Abana and Parphar, rivers of Damascus. 

Wild is the witchery of water, and the spell en¬ 
chanted, which its ceaseless flowing weaves. Such 
pictures were in that amber Fall. Such echoes an¬ 
swered those silver cadences. Such names, and 
places, and memories are now the synonymes of 
Trenton. But for you and for others it may sing 
different songs. An organ of many stops, it discour- 


70 


LOTUS-EATING. 


ses sweet music in all. Not like the airy harpsichord 
of the fair Alice, dead centuries ago, tuned to a sin¬ 
gle strain, but like the heart of the young Phoebe, 
gushing gaily or gravely, according as the sun or 
shadow overswept it. 

There is something especially pleasant in the tran¬ 
quil, family-like character of the house at Trenton. 
It is by far the best hostelry of the kind that I have 
encountered in my summer wandering; and, lying 
away from any town or railroad, the traveller seems 
to have stepped back into the days when travelling 
was an event and not a habit, and when the necessity 
of moderation in speed imposed a corresponding 
leisure in enjoyment. Doubtless the railroad makes 
us move mentally, as well as physically, with more 
rapidity. The eye sees more in life, but does the 
heart feel more, is experience really richer ? ^Tlaste 
breeds indigestion, but happiness lies, first of all, in 
health.) 

The man who in the quiet round of life has made 
friends with every object of the landscape he knows, 
who sees its changes, and sympathizes with them, 
and who has learned from a single tree what men 
have exhausted all libraries and societies without 
finding—he is of better, because of profounder, ex¬ 
perience than his friend who has raced over half the 
world in a twelve-month, and whose memory is only 


TRENTON. 


71 


a kaleidoscope. A mile horizontally on the surface 
of the earth does not carry you one inch toward its 
centre, and yet it is in the centre that the gold mines 
are. A man who truly knows Shakspeare, only, is 
the master of a thousand who have squeezed the cir¬ 
culating libraries dry. 

Do not fail to see Trenton. It is various-voiced. 
It is the playing of lutes on the moonlight lawn—as 
Stoddard delicately sings. It is well to listen for it 
in the pauses of the steam-shriek of our career. For 
if once your fancy hears its murmur, you will be as 
the boatman who catches through the roar of the 
Rhine, the song of the Lorelei, and you too, will be 
won to delicious repose. 

“ But thou, who dids’t appear so fair 
To fond imagination, 

Dost rival in the light of day, 

Her delicate creation: 

Meek loveliness is round thee spread, 

A softness still and holy: 

The grace of forest charms decayed, 

And pastoral melancholy. 

“ The vapors linger round the height; 

They meet—and soon must vanish: 

One hour is theirs, nor more is mine,— 

Sad thought, which I would banish, 

But that I know, where’er I go, 

Thy genuine image. Yarrow, 

Will dwell with me,—to heighten joy, 

And cheer my mind in sorrow.” 






NIAGARA. 


D 





August. 



he Kapids betoie 
lll'jMA Niagara are not of 
water only. The Cat- 
aract is the centre of 
a vortex of travel—a 
^ ^maelstrom which you 
scarcely suspect until you 
are swimming round in its intense 
^swiftness, and feel that you are 
'/ drawn nearer and closer, every mo¬ 
ment, to an awful and unimagined 
|f' f Presence. 

The summer-bird of a traveller who skims up the 
Hudson dippingly, wending Niagara-ward, if he has 
never seen the Falls, and has heard of them all his 
life, loiters along his way, quite unimpressed by the 
anticipation of his bourne, whose image has lost 




76 


LOTUS-EATING. 


much of its grandeur in liis mind by the household 
familiarity of the name. It is somewhat so with 
Switzerland after a residence in Europe. You ap¬ 
proach half languidly, more than half suspicious that 
the fixed stare of the world has melted the glaciers, 
and the snow sifted along inaccessible, rocky crevi¬ 
ces, or at least has sadly stained them, and that even 
the Alps have been lionized into littleness. But 
some choice evening, as if the earth had suddenly 
bared her bosom to the glowing kiss of the dying 
day, you behold from Berne or Zurich the austere 
purity of the snow-Alps, incredibly lofty, majestic 
and awful, and the worship of remembrance is for¬ 
ever after, living and profound. 

So I came sauntering along through Western ISTew 
York, (sauntering by steam !—and yet the mind may 
loiter, may remain fast and firm behind, although 
the body flies,) and turned aside with my presidential 
Antinous at Trenton, nor once paused to listen 
through its graceful whisper for the regal voice be¬ 
yond. In the ravine of Trenton you meet some 
chance friend returning from the great cataract, and 
sit with him upon the softest rock, where you can 
well watch the beautiful amber-fall the while, and 
curiously compare, at the last moment, your own fan¬ 
cies, with the daguerrean exactness of his fresh im¬ 
pression. But, after all, it is only curiously. You 


NIAGARA. 


77 


dream and wonder vaguely, and comparisons are 
constantly baffled by the syren singing of the falling 
waters which will have no divided love. Allured by 
the beauty in whose lap you lie, your friend’s present 
praises are much sincerer and more intelligible than 
his remembered raptures. 

Such a friend I met and we discussed Niagara. 
But as he told his story, I was placing the stairs here, 
and towers there, about the rocks; and the great 
sheet and the little sheet were before us; and Goat 
Island smiled greenly in the bold, beautiful bank, 
which, like a verdured terrace, hung toward the 
stream from an enchanted palace in the pines; and 
when the tale was told", I had a very pleasant, if 
somewhat incongruous, fancy of Niagara, as a kind 
of sublimed Trenton. 

And still, with memory clinging to the amber 
skirts of Trenton, I rushed along on a day that veiled 
the outline of the landscape with scudding gusts of 
mist, through the most classical of all American re¬ 
gions—through Home, and Manlius, and Syracuse, 
and Camillus, and Marcellus ; ruthlessly on, through 
Waterloo, Geneva, East Vienna, Rochester, Cold 
Water, Chili, (natural neighbors!) Byron, Attica 
and Darien; then drew breath enough to wonder, 
that with such wealth of names inherited from the 
Indians, we so tenaciously cling to the glories of old 


78 


LOTUS-EATING. 


fames to cover the nakedness of our newness, and 
saw, at the same moment that we had left classical- 
ity, that we had overtaken a name peculiar to our 
continent, and had arrived at Buffalo! 

Why not Bison, Ox, or Wild Horse ? And this, 
too, with the waves breaking along the shore of Lake 
Ontario, a majestic and melodious Indian name, 
hitherto unappropriated to a city. Ho wonder that 
the Buffalo sky thundered and lightened all night, 
from sheer vexation at its loss. I awoke at midnight 
to the music of a serenade that was vainly striving 
to soothe the tempest, and later, the angry clash of 
fire-bells stormed against the storm. But it was not 
comforted or subdued. Still, in the lull of the music, 
and the pauses of the bells, I heard it muttering and 
moaning as it glared: “I, that am Buffalo, might 
have been Ontario.” 

But the storm wept itself away, and I awoke at 
morning to find myself upon the verge of the interest 
and excitement which immediately precedes all great 
events. During the previous day I had smiled rather 
loftily at the idea of excitement in approaching Ni¬ 
agara ; but when my luggage was checked, and I 
bought a ticket for “ Niagara Falls,” and stepping 
into the cars, knew that I should not alight until I 
heard the roar and saw the spray of the cataract; 
then the sense of its grandeur, of its unique sublim- 


NIAGAKA. 


79 


ity, which I perfectly knew, though I had never seen, 
came down upon me, and smote me suddenly with 
awe—as when a man who has loitered idly to St. 
Peter’s, grasps the leathern curtain to push it aside, 
that he may behold the magnificence whose remem¬ 
bered lustre shall illuminate every year of his life. 

It is remarkable that the anti-romance of a rail¬ 
road is a mere prejudice. The straight lines piercing 
the rounding landscape are essentially poetic, and 
the fervid desire of sight and possession which fires 
the mind upon approaching beloved or famous places 
and persons, takes adequate form in the steam-speed 
of a train which, straight as thought and swift as 
hope, cleaves the country to the single point. In the 
wild woods we do not insist upon the prosaic charac¬ 
ter of the railroad, because we wish to hurry through; 
and no one, I believe, not even the poets, sigh for the 
good old times of staging from Albany to Niagara. 

But, in Europe, in lands of traditional romance, it 
appears at first very differently. A railroad to 
Yenice! “ Heaven forefend !” said I, as I lumbered 

easily out of Florence in a vettura, coriifortably ac¬ 
complishing its thirty miles a day. “ Heaven fore¬ 
fend !” said I still, as we climbed the Apennines, 
and descending, rolled into quaint, arcaded Bologna, 
and listened beneath Raphael’s St. Cecilia, to hear 
if no spirit of a sound trembled from the harp-strings. 


80 


LOTUS-EATING. 


“Heaven forefend!” said I still, as we jogged along 
the Lombard post-roads, green and golden, and glit¬ 
tering with the swaying of vines in the languid wind, 
hanging from grave, stiff old poplars, like beautiful, 
winning, bewildering arms of loveliness, caressing 
whole perspectives of solemn quaker papas, and fes¬ 
tooning the road as if the summer were a festival of 
Bacchus, and a jolly rout of bacchanals had but now 
reeled along to the vintage. “ Heaven forefend !” 
said I, as we tramped through the grassy streets of 
Ferrara, mouthing uncertain verses from Tasso, and 
utterly incredulous of Byron’s fable of songless gon¬ 
doliers beyond: and still, “ Heaven forefend 1” said 
I, as by the many-domed cathedral of St. Antony, we 
mingled in the evening Corso, and straining our eyes 
for the University of Padua, alighted at the hotel, 
thirty or forty miles from Yenice. But when, the 
next morning, I opened my eyes, and, eschewing the 
cud of dreams, said to myself, “ You are thirty miles 
from Yenice,” I sprang up like one whose marriage- 
morn has dawned, and cried aloud, “Thank God, 
there is a railroad to Yenice !” 

Hor could the speed of that railroad more than 
figure the eagerness of my desire, as it swept us 
through the vineyards. Hor did the dream of Yenice 
fade, but deepen rather, for the strange contrast of 
that wild speed, and its eternal, romantic rest. 


NIAGARA. 


81 


I had the same eagerness in stepping upon the cars 
at Buffalo. Within a certain circumference every body 
is Niagarized, and flies in a frenzy to the centre as fil¬ 
ings to the magnet. Before the train stopped, and 
while I fancied that we were slackening speed for a 
way-station—I, listening the while to the pleasant 
music of words, that weaned my hearing from any 
roar of waters—a crowd of men leaped from the cars, 
and ran like thieves, lovers, soldiers, or what you will, 
to the “ Cataract,” as the conductor said. I looked upon 
them at once as a select party of poets, overwhelmed 
by the enthusiastic desire to see the Falls. It was 
an error: they were “ knowing ones,” intent upon the 
first choice of rooms -at the “ Cataract House.” I 
followed them, and found a queue , as at the box-office 
of the opera in Paris—a long train of travellers wait¬ 
ing to enter their names. Hot one could have a room 
yet, (it was- ten o’clock,) but at half-past two every 
body was going away, and then every body could 
be accommodated. 

—And meanwhile ? 

—Meanwhile, Niagara. 

Disappointment in Niagara seems to be affected, 
or childish. Your fancies may be very different, but 
the regal reality sweeps them away like weeds and 
dreams. You may have nourished some impossible 
idea of one ocean pouring itself over a precipice into 


82 


LOTUS-EATING. 


another. But it was a wild whim of inexperience, 
and is in a moment forgotten. If, standing upon the 
bridge as you cross to Goat Island, you can watch 
the wild sweep and swirl of the waters around the 
wooded point above, dashing, swelling and raging, 
but awful from the inevitable and resistless rush, and 
not feel that your fancy of a sea is paled by the chaos 
of wild water that tumbles toward you, then you are 
a child, and the forms of your thought are not precise 
enough for the profoundest satisfaction in great nat¬ 
ural spectacles. 

Over that bridge how slowly you will walk, and 
how silently, gazing in awe at the tempestuous sweep 
of the rapids, and glancing with wonder at the faint 
cloud of spray over the American Fall. As the 
sense of grandeur and beauty subdues your mind, 
you will still move quietly onward, pausing a mo¬ 
ment, leaning a moment on the railing, closing your 
eyes to hear only Niagara, and ever, as a child says 
its prayers in a time of danger, slowly, and with 
strange slowness, repeating to yourself, “ Niagara ! 
Niagara!” 

For although you have not yet seen the Cataract, 
you feel that nothing else can be the crisis of this 
excitement. Were you suddenly placed blindfolded 
where you stand, and your eyes were unbandaged, 
and you were asked, “ What shall be the result of all 


NIAGARA. 


83 


this ?” the answer would accompany the question, 
“ Niagara!” 

Yet marvellous calmness still waits upon intense 
feeling. “ It was odd,” wrote Sterling to a friend, 
“ to be curiously studying the figures on the doctor’s 
waistcoat, while my life, as I thought, was bleeding 
from my lips.” We must still sport with our emo¬ 
tions. Some philosopher will die, his last breath 
sparkling from his lips in a pun. Some fair and 
fated Lady Jane Grey will span her slight neck with 
her delicate fingers, and smile to the headsman that 
his task is easy. And we, with kindred feeling, turn 
aside into the shop of Indian curiosities and play 
with Niagara, treating ft as a jester, as a Bayadere, 
to await our pleasure. 

Then, through the woods o«n Goat Island—solemn 
and stately woods—how slowly you will walk, again, 
and how silently! Ten years ago, your friend carved 
his name upon some tree there, and Niagara must 
now wait until he finds it, swollen and shapeless with 
time. You saunter on. It is not a sunny day. It 
is cloudy, but the light is moist and rich, and when 
you emerge upon the quiet green path that skirts the 
English Rapids, the sense of life in the waters—the 
water as a symbol of life and human passion—fills 
your mind. Certainly no other water in the world is 
watched with such anxiety, with such sympathy. 


84 


LOTUS-EATING. 



The helplessness of its frenzied sweep saddens your 
heart. It is dark, fateful, foreboding. At times, as 
if a wild despair had seized it and rent it, it seethes, 
and struggles, and dashes foam-like into the air. Not 
with kindred passion do you regard it, but sadly, 
with folded hands of resignation, as you watch the 
death struggles of a hero. It sweeps away as you 
look, dark, and cold, and curling, and the seething 
you saw, before your thought is shaped, is an eddy 
of foam in the Niagara River below. 


As yet you have not seen the Fall. You are com¬ 
ing with its waters, and are at its level. But groups 
of persons, sitting upon yonder point, which we see 
through the trees, are looking at the Cataract. We 
do not pause for them; we run now, down the path, 







NIAGARA. 


85 


along the bridges, into.the Tower, and lean far over 
where the spray cools our faces. The living water 
of the rapids moves to its fall, as if torpid with ter¬ 
ror ; and the river that we saw, in one vast volume 
now pours over the parapet, and makes Niagara. 
It is not all stricken into foam as it falls, hut the 
densest mass is smooth, and almost of livid green. 

Yet, even as it plunges, see how curls of spray 
exude from the very substance of the mass, airy, 
sparkling and wreathing into mist—emblems of the 
water’s resurrection into summer clouds. Looking 
over into the abyss, we behold nothing below, we 
hear only a slow, constant thunder ; and, bewildered 
in the mist, dream that'the Cataract has cloven the 
earth to its centre, and that, pouring its waters into 
the fervent inner heat, they hiss into spray, and 
overhang the fated Fall, the sweat of its agony. 






























































































































NIAGARA, AGAIN. 








. 


























•* r* 





f 










































































. 




• 

* 


• 


1 


* 

* • 















































































YL 

Hiitgarn, Slgain. 


August. 

rethusa arose 
From her couch of snows 
In the # Acroceraunian Mountains— 
From cloud and from crag 
With many a jag, 

Shepherding her bright fountains, 
She leapt down the rocks, 

With her rainbow locks 
Streaming among the streams : 

Her steps paved with green 
The downward ravine, 

Which slopes to the Western gleams: 

And gliding and springing, 

She went ever singing 
In murmurs as soft as sleep: 

The earth seemed to love her, 

And heaven smiled above her, 

As she lingered toward the deep. 

Shelley would wonder, could lie know that these 
lines of his were quoted at Niagara. But Niagara is 
no less beautiful than sublime, although I do not re¬ 
member to have heard much of its beauty. It even 



90 


LOTUS-EATING. 


suggests the personal feeling implied in such verses, 
and which, at a distance, seems utterly incompatible 
with the grandeur of the spot. 

Nature has her partialities for places as well as 
persons, and as she thrones the Goethean or Web 
sterian intellect upon “ the front of Jove himself,” 
so she is quite sure to adorn the feet of her snowy 
Alps with the lustrous green of vineyards, the stately 
shade of chestnuts, or the undulating sweep of lawn 
like pastures. Here at Niagara she enamels the 
cliffs with delicate verdure, and the luminous gloom 
of the wood upon Goat Island invites to meditation 
with cathedral solemnity. 

Nothing struck me more than the ease of access to 
the very verge of the cataract. Upon the narrow 
point between the large and small American falls 
you may sit upon the soft bank on a tranquil after¬ 
noon, dabbling your feet in the swiftly slipping 
water, reading the most dreamy of romances, and 
soothed by the huge roar, as if you were the vice¬ 
gerent of the prophet, and the flow of the cool, 
smooth river but the constant caressing of troops of 
slaves, and the roar of the Cataract but hushed 
voices singing their lord to sleep. 

But if in your reading you pause, or if the low rip¬ 
ple of talk subsides, in which your soul was laved, 
as your frame in the gurgling freshness of wood- 


NIAGARA. 


91 


streams, and your eyes, are left charmed upon the 
current—or if your dream dissolves and you behold 
the water, its own fascination is not less than that of 
the romance. It flows so tranquilly, is so unimpa- 
tient of the mighty plunge, that it woos and woos 
you to lay your head upon its breast and slide into 
dreamless sleep. 

Darkling, I listen; and. for many a time, 

I have been half in love with easeful death— 

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme 
To take into the air my quiet breath: 

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 

To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
In such an ecstacy! 

Still wouldst thou sing'and I have ears in vain 
To thy high requiem become a sod. 

So sang Keats to the nightingale which sang to 
him, and whoever was really so enamored could ill 
resist the seduction of the stream at the Falls. For 
in its might subsides all fear. It is a force so resist¬ 
less, that it would need only a slight step, the merest 
overture of your will. If Niagara were in France, I 
am confident the Frenchmen would make suicide 
pic-nics to the Cataract. Unhappy lovers would take 
express trains, and their <c quietus make ’’where their 
dirge would be endless. The French, of course, 
would add the melo-dramatic character of such an 
ending to its intrinsic charms, and even John Bull 


92 


LOTUS-EATING. 


might forego the satisfaction of a leap from the Duke 
of York’s column for a Niagaran annihilation. 

As yon sit, chatting and wondering, upon the bench 
at this point, you are sure to hear the sad romance of 
two years since. A young man caught up a child 
and swung it to and fro over the water only a few 
feet from the precipice, laughing gaily and. feign¬ 
ing fright, when suddenly the child sprang from his 
arms into the rapid. He stepped in instantly, for the 
water near the shore is not more than two feet deep, 
and caught her again in his arms. But the treach¬ 
erous stones at the bottom were so slippery with the 
constant action of the water, that, although he could 
resist the force of the stream, he could not maintain 
his foothold, and was swept with the child in his 
arms, and his betrothed mistress watching him from 
the bank, directly over the fall. The man who told 
me the story was a musician and had still a low tone 
of horror in his voice; for he said that, as the young 
man came to the Point, he told him there was to be 
a dance that evening and that he must have his 
music ready. They had ’scarcely parted, his words 
were yet ringing in his ears, when he heard a curd¬ 
ling shriek of terror, and knew that “ somebody had 
gone over the Falls.” - 

Niagara has but one interest, and that absorbs all 
attention. The country around is entirely level, and 


NIAGARA. 


93 



covered with woods and 
grain fields. It is 
very thinly pop¬ 
ulated ; civi¬ 
lization seems to 
have made 
small inroad 
upon the pri¬ 
meval grand¬ 
eur of the spot. 

Standing upon the 
western end of Goat 
Island and looking up 
the stream the wooded 
banks stare back upon 
you as in a savage si¬ 
lence of folded arms and 
scornful eyes. They are not 
fair woods, but dark forests. 

They smite you only with a sense of magnificent 
space, as I fancy the impression of Rocky Moun¬ 
tain scenery, but which is akin to that of chaos. 

From the spot where stood the young English her¬ 
mit’s cottage, upon Goat Island, you front the Cana¬ 
da shore. But the name dies along your mind 
almost without echo, even as your voice might call 
into those dark forests, but melt from them no human 



94 


LOTUS-EATING. 


response. Canada! The name is a mist in the 
mind. Slowly and vaguely a few remembrances 
shape themselves. Shadowy and terrible traditions 
of hopeless and heartless Indian wars, which tapped 
the choicest veins of French and English blood, but 
gave no glory in return, half tell themselves in the 
mind, like the croning of a beldame jn the chimney 
corner. 

Slowly from the red mist of that vague remem¬ 
brance rise the names of Wolfe and Montgomery and 
Montcalm, heroes where heroism little availed, for 
the Indian element mingled in the story, and where 
the Indian is, there nobility and chivalry are not. 
You look across the rapids upon a country which has 
made no mark in history; where few men love to 
live, except those who have little choice; where the 
towns are stagnant and few ; upon a country whose 
son no man is proud to be, and the barrenness of the 
impression somewhat colors your feelings of Niagara, 
for the American shore is wild too, although the 
zealous activity of the little village at the Falls, and 
the white neatness of Lewiston, below, relieve the 
sense of desolation upon the distant banks. 

The beauty of Niagara is in its immediate neigh 
borhood. It is upon Goat Island—upon the cliffs 
over which hangs the greenest verdure—in the trees 
that lean out and against the Eapids, as if the forest 


NIAGARA. 


95 



were ena¬ 
mored of 
the waters, 

and which overhang an 
dip, suffering their youngest^ 
and softest leaves to thrill in A * 
the trembling frenzy of the touchy \ t 
of Niagara. It is in the vivid con 
trast of the repose of lofty trees and 
the whirl of a living river—and in the 
contrast, more singular and subtle, of twinkling, 
shimmering leaves, and the same magnificent mad¬ 
ness. It is in the profuse and splendid play of col¬ 
ors in and around the Cataract, and in the thousand 
evanescent fancies which wreathe its image in the 
mind as the sparkling vapor floats, a rainbow, around 
the reality. It is in the flowers that grow quietly 
along the edges of the precipices, to the slightest of 





96 


LOTUS-EATING. 


which one drop of the clouds of spray that curl from 
the seething abyss is the sufficient elixir of a long 
and lovely life. 

Yet—for we must look the Alpine comparison 
which is'suggested to every one who knows Switzer¬ 
land, fairly in the face—the Alps are more terrible 
than Niagara. The movement and roar of the Cata¬ 
ract, and the facility of approach to the very plunge, 
relieve the crushing sense of awfulness which the 
silent, inaccessible, deadly solitudes of the high Alps 
inspire. The war of an avalanche heard in those 
solemn heights, because beginning often and ending 
beyond the point that human feet may ever tread, is 
a sound of dread and awe like that of the mysterious 
movement of another world, heard through the si¬ 
lence of our own. 

Besides, where trees grow, there human sympathy 
lingers. Doubtless it is the supreme beauty of the 
edges of Niagara, which often causes travellers to 
fancy that they are disappointed, as if in Semiramis 
they should see more of the woman than of the queen. 
But, climbing the Alps, you leave trees below. They 
shrink and retire. They lose their bloom and beauty. 
They decline from tenderness into toughness ; from 
delicate, shifting hues into sombre evergreen—dark¬ 
er and more solemn, until they are almost black, 
until they are dwarfed and scant and wretched, and 


NIAGAKA. 


97 


are finally seen no more. With the trees, you leave 
the sights and sounds and sentiments of life. The 
Alpine peaks are the ragged edges of creation, half 
blent with chaos. Upon them, inaccessible forever, 
in the midst of the endless murmur of the world, 
antemundane silence lies stranded, like the corse of 
an antediluvian upon a solitary rock-point in the sea. 
Painfully climbing toward those heights you may 
feel, with the fascination of wonder and awe, that 
you look, as the Chinese say, behind the beginning. 

But if the Alps are thus death, Niagara is life; 
and you know which is the more terrible. It is a 
life, however, which you are to observe in many 
ways—from below, from above, from the sides, from 
the suspension bridge, and, finally, you must steam 
up to its very front, and then climb down behind it. 

These two latter excursions are by no means to be 
omitted. The little steamer leaves the shore by the 
suspension bridge, and, gliding with effort into the 
current of the river, you remember that there is the 
Cataract before and the whirlpool behind, and sheer 
rocky precipices on each side. But there is only gay 
gossip and pleasant wonder all around you, the 
morning is mild, and the Falls flash like a plunge 
of white flame. Slowly, slowly, tugs the little boat 
against the stream. She hugs the shore, rocky- 
hearted, stiff, straight, prim old puritan of a shore 
E 


98 


LOTUS-EATING. 


that it is, although it is wreathed and crowned with 
graceful foliage. 

Presently comes a puff of cool spray. Is it a 
threat, a kiss, or a warning from our terrible bourne ? 
The fussy little captain exhorts every body to wrap 
in a water-proof cloak and cap; we shall else be 
soaked through and through, as we were never soaked 
by shower before. But some of us, beautiful daugh¬ 
ters of a mother famously fair, love our looks, and 
would fain enjoy every thing without making our¬ 
selves less lovely. 

“Pooh, pooh!” insists our captain, “I wouldn’t 
give three cents for them ’ere bunnets, (our choice 
travelling hats !) if they once get wet.” 

So we consent to cloaks, but we positively decline 
India-rubber caps, especially after an advance to six 
cents by a gallant friend upon the captain’s bid for 
our “ bunnets.” The men must shift for themselves. 
Here we are in the roar and the rush and the spray. 
Whew! it drives, it sweeps, and the steady thunder 
of the Cataract booms, cramming the air with sound. 
Only a few of us hold the upper deck. Nor are we, 
who have no mantles, all unprotected, for shawls 
wont to protect flowers from the summer wind, now 
shield us from the spray of Niagara. 

We sweep along upon our leaf, which quivers and 
skims the foam—sweep straight into the blinding 


NIAGARA. 


99 


white, thick, suffocating mist of the Cataract, strain 
our eyes, as we gasp, for the curve of the Fall, for 
the parapet above, and in a sudden break of the 
cloud, through which breathes cold the very air of 
the rush of waters, we catch a glorious glimpse of 
a calm ocean pouring white and resistless from the 
blue sky above into the white clouds below, and be¬ 
hold the very image of that Mind’s process whose 
might 

-“ Moves on 

His undisturbed affairs.” 

I glance backward upon the deck, which is raked 
by the scudding gusts pf spray, and see a line of wet 
men crouching together, like a group of Esquimaux, 
with their faces upturned toward the Fall. They sit 
motionless, and staring, and appalled, like a troop in 
Dante’s Inferno. But straight before us—good God ! 
pilot, close under the bow there, looming through the 
mist! Are you blind? are you mad? or does the 
Cataract mock our feeble power, and will claim its 
victims ? A black rock, ambushed in the surge and 
spray, lowers before us. We are driving straight 
upon it—we all see it, but we do not speak. We 
fancy that the boat will not obey—that the due fate 
shall reward this terrific trifling. Straight before us, 
a boat’s length away, and lo! swerving with the cur¬ 
rent around the rock, on and farther, with felicitous 


100 


LOTUS-EATING. 


daring, the little “Maid of the Mist” dances up to 
the very foot of the Falls, wrapping herself saucily 
in the rainbow robe of its own mist. There we trem¬ 
ble, in perfect security, mocking with our little Maid 
the might of Niagara. For man is the magician, 
and as he plants his foot upon the neck of mountains, 
and passes the awful Alps, safely as the Israelites 
through the divided sea, so he dips his hand into 
Niagara, and gathering a few drops from its waters, 
educes a force from Niagara itself, by which he con¬ 
fronts and defies it. The very water which as steam 
was moving us to the Cataract, had plunged over it 
as spray a few hours before. 

—Or go, some bright morning down the Biddle 
staircase, and creeping along under the cliff, change 
your dress at the little house by the separate sheet 
of the American Fall. The change made, we shall 
reappear like exhausted firemen, or Swampscot fish¬ 
ermen. Some of us will not insist upon our “ bun- 
nets” but will lay them aside and join the dilapidated 
firemen and fishermen outside the house, as Bloom- 
erized Undines, mermaids, or naiads. A few de¬ 
scending steps of rock, and we have reached the 
perpendicular wooden staircase that leads under the 
Fall. Do not stop—do not pause to look affrighted 
down into that whirring cauldron of cold mist, where 
the winds dart, blinding, in arrowy gusts. Now we 


NIAGARA. 


101 


see the platform across the bottom—now a cloud of 
mist blots it out. And it roars so ! 

Come, Fishermen, Mermaids, Naiads, Firemen 
and Undine, down ! down! Cling to the railing! 
Lean on me ! Thou gossamer blossom which the 
softest summer zephyr would thrill, whither will 
these mad gales beneath the Cataract whirl thee ! 
We are here upon the narrow platform; it is railed 
upon each side, and the drops dash like sleet, like 
acute hail, against our faces. The swift sweep of 
• the water across the floor would slide us also into the 
yawning gulf beyond, but clinging with our hands, 
we move securely as in calm airs. And now look 
up, for you stand directly beneath the arching water, 
directly under the fall. The rock is hollowed, and 
the round pebbles on the ground rush and rattle with 
the sliding water as on the sea-beach. You leave 
the platform, you climb between two rocks, and slid¬ 
ing along a staging, unstable almost as the water, 
yet quite firm enough, you stand directly upon the 
rocks, and Niagara plunges and tumbles above you 
and around you. 

There at sunset, and only there, you may see three 
circular rainbows, one within another. For Niagara 
has unimagined boons for her lovers—rewards of 
beauty so profound that she enjoins silence as the 
proof of fidelity. 


102 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Returning, there is an overhanging shelf of rock, 
and there, except that it is cold and wet, you sit se¬ 
cluded from the spray. It is a lonely cave, curtained 
from the sun by the Cataract, forever. And if still 
your daring is untamed, you may climb over slippery 
rocks in the blinding mist and the deafening roar, 
and feel yourself as far under the Great American 
Fall as human foot may venture. 

I must stop. If you have been at Niagara, what 
I have written may recall it, but can hardly paint, 
except to remembrance, the austere grandeur and 
dreamy beauties which are its characteristics. Your 
few days there are days upon the river bank, walk¬ 
ing and wondering. Your frail fancies of it are 
swallowed up as they rise, like chance flowers flung 
upon its current. Many a man to whom Niagara 
has been a hope, and an inspiration, and who has 
stood before its majesty awe-stricken and hushed, 
secretly wonders that his words describing it are not 
pictures and poems. But any great natural object— 
a cataract, an Alp, a storm at sea—are seed too vast 
for any sudden flowering. They lie in experience 
moulding life. At length the pure peaks of noble 
aims and the broad flow of a generous manhood 
betray that in some happy hour of youth you have 
seen the Alps and Niagara. 


SARATOGA. 


• * 





















* 

















* 











































































. 
































August. 


ilt tliou be a nun, Sophie 1 
Nothing but a nun 1 
Is it not a better thing 
With thy friends to laugh and sing'! 
To be loved and sought 1 ? 

To be wooed and—won'? 

Dost thou love the shadow, Sophie'? 
Better than the sun I 

Romance is the necessary 
association of watering-places, because they are the 



haunts of youth and beauty seeking pleasure. When 
on some opaline May day you drive out from Naples 
to Baise, the Saratoga of old Rome, and in the golden 
light of the waning afternoon drink Fa^ernian while 
you look upon the vineyards where it ripened for 
Horace, your fancy is thronged with the images of 
Romance, and you could listen to catch some echo 


of a long silent love-song, lingering in the air. 

It is a kind of sentimentality inseparable from the 


106 


LOTUS-EATING. 


spot—a pensive reverie into which few men are loth 
to fall; for its atmosphere is “ the light that never was 
on sea or land.” Yet romance, like a ghost, eludes 
touching. It is always where you were, not where 
you are. The interview or the conversation was 
prose at the time, but it is poetry in memory. 

Thus persons of poetic feeling speak of people and 
events as if they were the figures of a romance and 
are laughed at for seeing every thing through their 
imagination. But why is it not as pleasant to see 
through imagination as through scepticism ? Why, 
because people are bad, should I be faithless of the 
virtues of a beautiful woman ? 

Life is the best thing we can possibly make of it. 
It is dull and dismal and heavy, if a man loses his 
temper : it is glowing with promise and satisfaction 
if he is not ashamed of his emotions. Young America 
is very anxious to be a man of the world. He has 
heard that in England a gentleman is a being of 
sublime indifference, who has exhausted all varieties 
of experience—who has, in fact, opened the oyster 
of the world. So Young America cultivates non¬ 
chalance with the ladies, and cannot help it if he 
does know every thing that is worth knowing. To 
every man of thought and perception he is the miser¬ 
able travesty of a human being, whose social life is 
an injustice and an insult to every woman. 


SARATOGA. 


107 


He does not see that indifference is satiety—-that 
it is the weakness of a man whom circumstances 
have mastered, and not the sensitive calmness, like a 
lake’s surface, of profound and digested experience. 
What is the charm of a belle but her purely natural 
manners % And they are charming, not in themselves, 
but because they harmonize with her nature and 
character. Yet if another person imitates her man¬ 
ners in the hope of being a belle, the result is at once 
ludicrous and painful. But such musings, however 
suggested by the place, I fancy you will consider the 
sand barren in which Saratoga lies. 

The romance of a watering-place, like other ro¬ 
mance, always seems past when you are there. Here 
at Saratoga, when the last polka is polked, and the 
last light in the ball-room is extinguished, you saun¬ 
ter along the great piazza, with the “good night” of 
Beauty yet trembling upon your lips, and meet some 
old Habitud, or even a group of them, smoking in 
lonely arm-chairs, ahd meditating the days departed. 

The great court is dark and still. The waning 
moon is rising beyond the trees, but does not yet 
draw their shadows, moonlight-mosaics, upon the 
lawn. There are no mysterious couples moving in 
the garden, not a solitary foot-fall upon the piazza. 
A few lanterns burn dimly about the doors, and the 
light yet lingering in a lorty chamber reminds you 


108 


LOTUS-EATING. 


that some form, whose grace this evening has made 
memory a festival, is robing itself for dreams. 

If courtly Edmund Waller were with you, it would 
not be hard to tempt him to step with you across the 
court to serenade under that window, with the most 
musical and genuine of his verses. 

Go, lovely Rose! 

Tell her who wastes her time and me, 

That now she knows, 

When I resemble her to thee, 

How sweet and fair she seems to be. 

Tell her that’s young, 

And shuns to have her graces spied, 

That hadst thou sprung 
In deserts where no men abide, 

Thou must have uncommended died. 

Small is the worth 
Of beauty from the light retired; 

Bid her come forth, 

Suffer herself to be desired, 

And not blush so to be admired. 

Then die ! that she 
The common fate of all things rare 

May read in thee— 

How small a part of time they share, 

That are so wondrous sweet and fair. 

He not being at Saratoga this year you are con¬ 
tent with looking across the court and remembering 
his song. The moonlight softens your heart as did 
the golden days at Baise. You, too, seat yourself in 
a lonely arm-chair, and your reveries harmonize with 


SARATOGA. 


109 


the melancholy minor of the old Habitue’s reflections. 
You speak to him, musingly, of the u lovely Rose” 
who wastes her time and you. 

“Yes,” he responds, “but you should have seen 
Saratoga in her mother’s days.” 

And while the moon rides higher, and pales from 
the yellow of her rising into a watery lustre, you 
hear stories of blooming belles, who are grandmoth¬ 
ers now, and of brilliant beaux, bald now and gouty. 
These midnight gossips are very mournful. They 
will not suffer you to leave those, whose farewells yet 
thrill your heart, in the eternal morning of youth, but 
compel you to forecast their doom, to draw sad and 
strange outlines upon "the future—to paint pictures 
of age, wrinkles, ochre-veined hands and mobcaps— 
until your Saratoga episode of pleasure has sombreed 
into an Egyptian banquet, with your old, silently- 
smoking, and meditative Habitue for the death’s 
head. 

Hor is it strange that you should then repeat to 
him Charles Lamb’s “ Gipsy’s Malison,” with its fan¬ 
tastic, Egyptian-like sternness. 

Suck, baby, suck, mother’s love grows by giving, 

Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting; 

Black manhood comes, when riotous, guilty living 
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting. 

Kiss, baby, kiss, mother’s lips shine by kisses, 

Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings; 


110 LOTUS-EATING. 

Black manhood comes, when turbulent, guilty blisses 
Tends thee the kiss that poisons mid caressings. 

Hang, baby, hang, mother’s love loves such forces, 

Shame the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging. 

Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses 
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging. 

In fact, after a few such midnights, even the morn¬ 
ing sunshine cannot melt away this Egyptian char¬ 
acter from the old Habituds. As you cross the court, 
after breakfast, to the bowling alley, with a bevy so 
young and lovely, that age and mob-caps seem only 
fantastic visions of dyspepsia, and, of hearts that 
were never young, you will see them sitting, a solemn 
reality of “ black manhood,” along the western piaz¬ 
za, leaning back in arm-chairs, smoking perhaps, 
chatting of stocks possibly,—a little rounded in the 
shoulders, holding canes which are no longer foppish 
switches, but substantial and serious supports. They 
are the sub-bass in the various-voiced song, the pro¬ 
saic notes to the pleasant lyric of Saratoga life. 

They are not really thinking of stocks, nor are 
they very conscious of the flavor of their cigars, but 
they watch the scene as they would dream a dream. 
As the sound of young voices pulses toward them on 
the morning air, as they watch the flitting forms, the 
cool morning-dresses, the gush of youth overflowing 
the sunny and shady paths of the garden, they are 
old Habituds no longer; they are those gentlemen, 


SARATOGA. 


Ill 


gallant and gay, dancing in the warm light of bright 
eyes toward a future gorgeous as a sunset, gossipping 
humorously or seriously, according as the light of 
eyes is sunshine or moonlight, and it is themselves as 
they were, with their own parties, their own loves, 
jealousies and scandals, moving briskly across the 
garden to the bowling alley. 

We pass,—butterflies of this summer,—and the 
vision fades upon their eyes. It was only the image 
of dead days, only the Fata Morgana of the en¬ 
chanted islands they shall see no more, only the 
ghosts of grace and beauty, that witched the world 
for their youth. 

“ The mossy marbles rest 
On the lips that they have pressed 
In their bloom, 

And the names they loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 
On the tomb.” 

We stroll down the street to Congress Hall, we 
make a pilgrimage to the piazza, which was the 
Saratoga of our reading and romance—to Congress 
Hall, across whose smooth-columned piazza we pass, 
to pay the tribute of our homage to the spot where 
so much love beat in warm hearts and blushed in 
beautiful cheeks. For when Saratoga was first 
fashionable, Congress Hall was the temple of fashion. 

If you observe, while “we youth” (as Falstaft* 


112 


LOTUS-EATING. 


would say, were he an old Habitue,) are grieving 
that the romance is gone, and are regretting its going 
to the companion of our promenade, and are sitting, 
meditative and melancholy, with the Habitues at 
midnight, we are all the while, and therein, tasting 
quite as sparkling a draught of romance as ever our 
revered grandparents quaffed. And no sooner have 
the doors of the “ United States” clanged awful upon 
our departure, than sad and sweet faces of remem¬ 
brance look from all the windows, and in the young, 
feminine fancy, when Saratoga is once left behind, 
the great hotel stands shining like a transfigured 
palace of fairy. 

Be assured, Saratoga is still a golden-clasped, il¬ 
luminated romance for summer reading. Young 
men still linger, loth to fly, and when the trunk must 
be packed, they yet sit gossipping upon the edge of 
the bed, and were you under it, you would hear how 
every Tom Thumb, or Prince Riquet with the tuft, 
was the most chivalric and resistless of King Arthurs ; 
what innumerable fair-haired Preciosas were wonder¬ 
ing at the same wonderful Arthurs ; and how many 
a Fatima has been rescued, or at least was clearly 
ready to be rescued, from unpolking, stock-jobbing, 
mercantile old Blue Beards. Then, gorged with ex¬ 
perience, blasd of the world, patronising and endur¬ 
ing life, the royal Arthurs, scorning the heaps of 


SARATOGA. 


113 


broken hearts they leave behind, transfer themselves 
and their boots to a new realm of conquest at New 
port, and reduce the most impregnable heart with a 
Redowa, or a fatally fascinating Schottish. 

But while we laugh at Saratoga, its dancing, dress¬ 
ing, and flirtation, it is yet a “ coign of vantage” for 
an observing eye. It is not all dress and dancing. 
Like every aspect of life, and like most persons, it is 
a hint and suggestion of someting high and poetic. 
It is an oasis of repose in the desert of our American 
hurry. Life is leisurely there, and business is amuse¬ 
ment. 

It is perpetual festival. The “United 
States” is the nearest hit we 
Americans can make to Boc- 
cacio’s garden. It is a spa¬ 
cious house, admirably 
kept, with a stately pi¬ 
azza surrounding a ^ 
smooth green lawn, 
constantly close-shaven, 
shadowed with 


and 

lofty trees. Along that 
stately piazza we pass to the ball- “ 
room, and cross that lawn under those trees to the 
bowling-alley, and the place of spirits. We rise and 
breakfast at any time. Then we chat a little and 






114 


LOTUS-EATING. 


bowl till noon. If you choose, you may sit apart and 
converse, instead of bowling, upon metaphysics and 
morals. At noon, we must return to the parlor and 
practice the polka which we have not danced since 
yesterday midnight. There are sofas and comforta¬ 
ble chairs strewn around the room, and, if you have 
reached no metaphysical conclusion, in the bowling- 
alley, you may wish to continue your chat. We 
ladies must go shopping after the polka, and we mere 
men may go to the bath. Dinner then, in our semi¬ 
toilettes, feeing Ambrose and Anthony to get us 
something to eat, and watching the mighty Morris, 
in an endless frenzy of excitement, tearing his hair, 
whenever a plate, loud-crashing, shivers on the floor. 

After dinner the band plays upon the lawn, and 
we all promenade upon the piazza, or in the walks 
of the court, or sit at the parlor windows. We dis¬ 
cuss the new arrivals. We criticise dresses, and 
styles, and manners. We discriminate the arctic 
and antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, and stately, with 
a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the 
languid, cordial, and careless Southerners, far from 
precise in dress or style, but balmy in manner as a 
bland southern morning. We mark the crisp cour¬ 
tesy of the Hew Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive 
in association, a pallid ghost of Paris—without its 
easy elegance, its bonhommie , its gracious sa/vior 


SARATOGA. 


115 


faire , without the sjpiritvsl sparkle of its conversa¬ 
tion, and its natural and elastic grace of style. We 
find that a Parisian toilette is not France, nor grace, 
nor fascination. We discover that exclusiveness is 
not elegance. 

But while we mark and moralize, the last strain of 
Lucia or Ernani has died away, and it is 5 o’clock. 
A crowd of carriages throngs the street before the 
door, there is a flutter through the hall, a tripping 
up and down stairs, and we are bowling along to the 
lake. There is but one drive: every body goes to 
the lake. And no sooner have we turned by the 
Congress Spring, than we are in the depths of the 
country, in a long, level reach of pines, with a few 
distant hills of the Green Mountains rolling along 
the horizon. It is a city gala at the hotel, but the 
five minutes were magical, and among the pines 
upon the road we remember the city and its life as a 
winter dream. 

The vivid and sudden contrast of this little drive 
with the hotel, is one of the pleasantest points of 
Saratoga life. In the excitement of the day, it is 
like stepping out on summer evenings from the glar¬ 
ing ball-room upon the cool and still piazza. 

There is a range of carriages at the Lake. A se¬ 
lect party is dining upon those choice trouts, black 
bass and young woodcock—various other select par- 


116 


LOTUS-EATING. 



ties are scattered about upon tbe banks or on the 
piazza, watching the sails and sipping cobblers. The 
descent to the Lake is very steep, and the smooth 
water is dotted with a few boats gliding under the 
low, monotonous banks. The afternoon is tranquil, 
the light is tender, the air is soft, and the lapping 
of the water upon the pebbly shore is haply not so 
musical as words spoken upon its surface. 

In the sunset we bowl back again to the hotel. 1 
saw most autumnal sunsets at Saratoga, cold and 
gorgeous, like the splendor of October woods. They 
were still and solemn over the purple hills of the 
horizon, and their light looked strangely in at the 
windows of the hotel. Many a belle, just arrived 
from the drive and about to consider the evening’s 













SARATOGA. 


117 


dressing, paused a moment at the window, stood re¬ 
splendent in that dying light, and a shade of melan¬ 
choly touched her lithe fancies, as p, cloud dims the 
waving of golden grain. Who had stood there to 
dress for a Saratoga ball years ago ? Who should 
stand there, dressing, years to come ? This Saratoga, 
dreamed of, wondered at, longed for—where to be a 
belle was the flower of human felicity—whose walks, 
drives, hops, moonlight talks and mornings should 
be the supreme satisfaction—had it fulfilled its 
promise ? 

This moment not Waller should speak to her but 
Wordsworth, with pensiveynusic: 

Look at the fate of summer flowers, 

Which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song: 

And, grieved for their brief date, confess that ours 
Measured by what we are and ought to be, 

Measured by all that, trembling, we foresee, 

Is not so long! 

If human life do pass away, 

Perishing, yet more swiftly than the flower, 

Whose frail existence is but of a day: 

What space hath Virgin’s beauty to disclose 
Her sweets, and triumph o’er the breathing rose, 

Not even an hour! 

The deepest grove whose foliage hid 
The happiest lovers Arcady might boast, 

Could not the entrance of this thought forbid: 

0 be thou wise as they, soul-gifted maid! 

Nor rate too high what must so quickly fade, 

So soon be lost! 


118 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Then shall Love teach some virtuous youth 
“ To draw out of the object of his eyes’* 

The whilst on thee they gaze in simple truth, 

* Hues more exalted, “ a refined form,” 

That dreads not age, nor suffers from the worm, 

And never dies! 

—She comes at last. The sun has set, and with it 
those weird fancies, those vague thoughts that 
streamed shapelessly through her mind like these 
long, sad vapors through the twilight sky. Nor, for 
that moment, is the belle less gay, though more beau¬ 
tiful, nor is Saratoga less charming. 

Music flows towards us from the ball-room in lan¬ 
guid, luxurious measures, like warm, voluptuous arms 
wreathing around us and drawing us to the dance. 
When we enter the hall we find very few people, but 
at the lower end a sprinkling of New Yorklings are 
in their heaven. 

Dancing is natural and lovely as singing. The 
court of youth and beauty—with the presence of 
brilliantly dressed women, and an air smoothed and 
softened with delicate and penetrating perfumes, and 
the dazzling splendor of lights, is a song unsung, a 
flower not blossomed, until you mingle in movement 
with the strain—until the scene is so measured by 
the music that they become one. This has been said 
so finely by De Quincey that I cannot refrain from 
enriching my pages with the quotation ; 


SAEATOGA. 


119 


“ And in itself, of all the scenes which this world 
offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none 
(I say deliberately) so affecting, as the spectacle of 
men and women floating through the mazes of a 
dance; under these conditions, however, that the 
music shall be rich and festal, the execution of the 
dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character 
to admit of free, fluent and continuous motion. * * * 
And wherever the music happens to be not of a light, 
trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal 
pleasure, and the performers in the dance so far 
skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the 
ludicrous, I believe that many persons feel as I feel 
in such circumstances, viz.: derive from the spectacle 
the very grandest form of passionate sadness which 
can belong to any spectacle whatsoever. * * * 

From all which the reader may comprehend, if he 
should not happen experimentally to have felt, that a 
spectacle of young men and women flowing through 
the mazes of an intricate dance, under a full volume 
of music, taken with all the circumstantial adjuncts 
of such a scene in rich men’s halls, the blaze of lights 
and jewels, the life, the motion, the sea-like undula¬ 
tion of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the ana- 
kuJclosis , or self-revolving, both of the dance and the 
music; never ending, still beginning, and the con¬ 
tinual regeneration of order from a system of motions 


120 


LOTUS-EATING. 


which seem forever to approach the very brink of 
confusion; that such a spectacle, with such circum¬ 
stances, may happen to be capable of exciting and 
sustaining the very grandest emotions of philosophic 
melancholy to which the human spirit is open. The 
reason is in part that such a scene presents a sort of 
masque of human life, with its whole equipage of 
pomps and glories, its luxuries of sight and sound, 
its hours of golden youth, and the interminable rev¬ 
olution of ages hurrying after ages, and one genera¬ 
tion treading over the flying footsteps of another, 
whilst all the while the overruling music attempers 
the mind to the spectacle,—the subject (as a Ger¬ 
man would say) to the object, the beholder to the 
vision. And although this is known to be but one 
phase of life—of life culminating and in ascent—yet 
the other and repulsive phasis is concealed upon the 
hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known 
but not felt—or is seen but dimly in the rear, crowd¬ 
ing into indistinct proportions. The effect of the 
music is to place the mind in a state of elective- 
attraction for every thing in harmony with its own 
prevailing key.” 

I do not know how far others will acknowledge the 
justice of this brilliant passage, but to me it gave a 
thrill of satisfaction when I read it, as the expression 
of what is often felt in such circumstances. The secret 


SARATOGA. 


121 


of the feeling is in the entire harmony of the music 
and the movement—it is that the dancing is the visi¬ 
ble form of the infinite and subtle suggestions of the 
music. Who that has felt the extreme pathos of 
Strauss’s Waltzes but has known them seem to the 
sensitive imagination, excited by the grace and beau¬ 
ty of women and the odorous brilliancy of a thronged 
hall, passionate love-lyrics? Hor will you be sur¬ 
prised, if you have been haunted by their sadness as 
you listened, and especially as you danced to them, 
to hear that the best are Bohemian and Hungarian 
songs, wrought into the form of a waltz. The nation¬ 
al songs of all people being always in a minor key. 

This is a day at Saratoga, and all days there. It 
is a place for pleasure. The original aim of a visit 
thither, to drink the waters, is now mainly the excuse 
of fathers and. of the Habitues, to whom, however, 
summer and Saratoga are synonymous. It is our 
pleasant social exchange. There we step out of the 
worn and weary ruts of city society, and mingle in a 
broad field of various acquaintance. There we may 
scent the fairest flowers of the south and behold the 
beauty which is ours, of which we have a right to be 
proud in Italy and Spain, but which is really less 
familiar to most of us northerners than Spanish or 
Italian beauty. There, too, men mingle and learn 
from contact and sympathy a sweeter temper and a 
F 


122 


LOTUS-EATING. 


more Catholic consideration, so that the summer 
flowers we went to wreathe may prove not the gar¬ 
land of an hour, but the firmly linked chain of an 
enduring union. 

If you seek health, avoid it if you can; or if you 
must drink the waters there, take rooms in some other 
house, not in the “ United States,” where you will be 
tortured with the constant vision of the carnival of 
the high health you have lost. Youth, health and 
beauty are still the trinity of Saratoga. Ho old belle 
ever returns. Ho girl who was beautiful and famous 
there, comes as a grandmother to that gay haunt. 
The ghosts of her blooming days would dance a dire¬ 
ful dance around her in the moonlight of the court. 
Faces that grew sad, and cold, and changed, would 
look in at her midnight window. Phantoms of prom¬ 
enades, when the wish was spoken rather than the 
feeling, would make her shudder as she hurried 
along the piazza. The dull aching sense of youth 
passed forever would become suddenly poignant, as 
she glanced upon the gay groups, gay as she was 
gay, young and fair no more than she had been. 
Worst of all, if in some lonely path she met gray- 
aired, dull-eyed and tottering upon crutches, the 
handsome and graceful partner of her first Saratoga 
season. 

You will not linger long. A week with Calypso is 


SARATOGA. 


123 


all that a wise Telemachus will allow himself. But 
he will not be unjust to its character nor deem it all 
folly. And if, after dinner, you walk slowly through 
the garden with Robert Herrick toward the railroad, 
by the music and the groups who listen to it, he, 
watching their youth and beauty, will say to them in 
farewell, as he did 


TO BLOSSOMS. 

Fair pledges of a fruitful tree* 

Why do you fall so fast*? 

Your date is not so past, 

But you may stay yet here awhile 
To blush and gently smile, 

And go at last. 

What! were ye born to be 
An hour or half’s delight, 

And so to bid good night 'l 
’T was pity nature brought ye forth 
Merely to show your worth, 

And lose you quite. 

But you are lovely leaves, where we 
May read how soon things have 
Their end, tho’ ne’er so brave: 

And after they have shown their pride 
Like you, awhile, they slide 
Into the grave. 





LAKE GEORGE. 

















VIII. 

%akt (0tnrgf. 


August. 



^ n hour upon the railroad brings you 
^ from Saratoga to the Moreau Sta¬ 
tion. Here you climb a stage¬ 
coach to roll across the country to 
|Xake George. It is a fine strip of land- 
fl? scape variously outlined, and with glimpses 
**'of beautiful distance. The driver pointed out to 
us the tree under which Jane McCrea was murdered 
by the Indians—a lovely spot, meet for so sad a tra¬ 
dition. Between us and the dim-rolling outline of 
the Green Mountains were the windings of the Hud¬ 
son, which here, in its infancy, is a stream of fine 
promise, and rolled our fancies forward to its beauti¬ 
ful banks below, its dark highlands, its glassy reaches, 
and the forms of friends on lawns and in gardens 
along its shores. 

We dined at Glen’s Falls, which we visited. They 



128 


LOTUS-EATING. 


are oppressed by the petty tyranny of a decayed 
dynasty of saw-mills, and the vexed river rages and 
tumbles among channelled rocks, making a fine spec¬ 
tacle of the Trentonian character. Then we bowled 
along through a brilliant afternoon toward the Lake. 
The road is one of the pleasantest I remember. And 
particularly on that day the grain-fields and the 
mountains were of the rarest delicacy of tone and 
texture. Through the trees, an hour from Glen’s 
Falls, I saw a sheet of water, and we emerged upon 
a fine view of the Lake. 

An azure air, of which the water seemed only a 
part more palpable, set in hills of graceful figure 
and foliage, and studded with countless isles of ro¬ 
mantic beauty—such a picture as imagination touches 
upon the transparent perfection of summer noons, 
was my fancy of Lake George. 

It was but partly true. 

Caldwell is a hamlet at the southern end of the 
Lake. It is named from an eccentric gentleman, 
(illiberal obstinacy is always posthumously beatified 
into eccentricity) who owned the whole region, built 
a hotel on the wrong spot, determined that no one else 
should build anywhere, and ardently desired that 
no more people should settle in the neighborhood ; 
and, in general, infested the southern shore with a 
success worthy of a mythological dragon. Instead. 


LAKE GEORGE. 


129 


therefore, of a fine hotel at the extremity of the Lake, 
commanding a view of its length, and situated in 
grounds properly picturesque, there is a house on one 
side of the end, looking across it to the opposite 
mountain, and forever teasing the traveller with won¬ 
der that it stands where it does. 

The hotel is kept admirably, however, and the 
faults of position and size are obviated, as far as pos¬ 
sible, by the courtesy and ability of the host. But 
the increasing throng of travel justifies the erection 
of an inn equal in every manner to the best. This 
year the little hamlet was but the M colony” of the 
hotel, and a mile across the Lake, on the opposite 
shore, was a small house for the accommodation of 
the public. 

Lake George is a strange lull in excitement after 
Saratoga. Its tranquillity is like the morning after 
a ball. There is nothing to do but to bowl or to sit 
upon the piazza, or to go fishing upon the Lake. It 
is a good place to study fancy fishermen, who have 
taken their piscatory degrees in Wall and Pearl- 
streets. Most of the visitors are guests of a night, 
but there are also pleasant parties who pass weeks 
upon the Lake, and listen to the enthusiastic stories 
of Saratoga as incredulously as to Syren-songs; to 
whom Saratoga is a name and a vapor, incredible as 
the fervor of a tropical day to the Bussian Empress 


130 


LOTUS-EATING. 


in her icy palace ; parties of a character rare in our 
country, who do not utterly surrender the summer to 
luxurious idleness, hut steal honey from the flowers 
as they fly. 

And if, strolling upon the piazza, while the moon 
paves a quivering path across the water, along which 
throng enchanted recollections, a quiet voice asks if 
Como’s self is more lovely, you are glad to say to one 
who understands it, your feelings of the difference 
between European and American scenery. We were 
watching the water from the piazza, over the low 
trees in the garden, when the empress said to me, 
“Now is it not more beautiful than Como?” It was 
an unfortunate question, because the Lake of Como 
is the most beautiful lake the traveller sees, and be¬ 
cause the details of comparisons were instantly forced 
upon my mind. 

Lake George is a simple mountain lake upon the 
verge of the wilderness. You ascend from its banks 
westward and plunge into a wild region. The hills 
that frame the water are low, and when not bare— 
for fires frequently consume many miles of wood¬ 
land on the hillsides—covered with the stiffly out¬ 
lined, dark and cold foliage of evergreens. Among 
these are no signs of life. Y r ou might well fancy the 
populace of the primeval forest yet holding those re¬ 
treats. You might still dream in the twilight that it 


LAKE GEORGE. 


131 


were not impossible to catch the ring of a French oi 
English rifle, or the wild whoop of the Indian; sure 
that the landscape you see, was the same they saw, 
and their remotest ancestors. 

From the water rise the rocks, sometimes solitary 
and hearing a single tree, sometimes massed into a 
bowery island. 

The boat-boys count the isles of the Lake by the 
days of the year, and tell you of three hundred and 
sixty-five. It is a story agreeable enough to hear, 
but wearisome when the same thing is told at every 
pretty stretch of islanded water. In the late after¬ 
noon or by moonlight, it is pleasant to skim the quiet 
Lake to the little Tea Island, which has a tree-shel¬ 
tered cove for harbor and on which stands a ruined 
temple to T. But whether bohea, or gunpowder, or 
some more mysterious divinity, the boat-boys reluct 
to say, and you must rely on fancy to suggest. I 
only know, that as we pushed aside the branches 
that overhang the cove and climbed to the Island 
and the Temple, we had no sooner set foot upon its 
floor, and gazed dreamily forth over the Lake, which 
the moon enchanted, than the slow beat of oars 
pushed through the twilight, and directly across the 
moon-paven path of the water shot a skiff with female 
figures only. 

The throb of oars approached, and singing voices 


132 


LOTUS-EATING. 



mingled with the beat. The boat drove silently into 
the black shadow of the cove, the singing ceased, and 
a hushed tumult of low laughter trembled through 
the trees. For that moment I was a South Sea Isl¬ 
ander, a Typeean, a Herman Melville, and down the 
ruined steps I ran to catch a moonlight glimpse of 
Fayaway, but saw only the rippling brilliance of the 
rapidly fading boat. Therefore I know not what 
forms they were, nor the moonlight mysteries of Lake 
George, nor of the little T Island, 

“What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape, 

Of Deities, or Mortals, or of both.” 

Another day we spread our sails and flew four 
miles up the Lake to Diamond Island. It has a little 
stony beach, on which crystals are found, and here 
also are ruins, but of nothing more stable than Itobin 
Hood’s temples. A faded bower, spacious enough 
for the pavilion of the loveliest May Queen, and ro- 











LAKE GEORGE. 


133 


mantic enough for a trap of Fancy to catch reveries, 
is the ruin of the Island. 

The brisk wind that blew us rapidly thither drooped 
as it passed the faded bower, and the lake lapped 
idly against the stones as we embarked for Caldwell. 
We drifted homewards in gusts and calms, while a 
gorgeous sunset streamed from behind the western 
mountains. It faded into pensive twilight, the very 
hour of Wordsworth’s lines— 

How richly glows the water’s breast 
Before us, tinged with evening’s hues, 

While, facing thus the crimson West, 

The boat her silent course pursues. 

And see how dark the backward stream, 

A little moment past so smiling! 

And still, perhaps, with faithless gleam, 

Some other loiterers beguiling. 

Such views the youthful bard allure, 

But heedless of the following gloom, 

He dreams their colors shall endure, 

Till peace go with him to the tomb. 

—And let him nurse his fond deceit, 

And what if he must die in sorrow, 

Who would not cherish dreams so sweet, 

Though grief and pain may come to-morrow. 


All this was pleasant, but all this does not make a 
lake as beautiful as Como. Here, at Lake George, 
is no variety of foliage. The solemn evergreens 
emphasize the fact of a wild primeval landscape. 
Were there brilliant, full-foliaged chestnuts, or lus- 


134 


LOTUS-EATING. 


trous vines, to vary the monotony of hue, or spiring 
cypresses and domed stone pines to multiply differ¬ 
ent forms, or long reaches of terraced shore, the 
melancholy monotony of impression, which is now so 
prominent, would be alleviated. The scene is too 
sad and lonely. The eye is tortured by the doomed 
ranks of firs and hemlocks, that descend like resigned 
martyrs to the shore. It is not sublime, it is not the 
perfection of loneliness, it is not the best of its kind. 
Yet in the August moonlight the empress asked me 
if it was not more beautiful than Como. 

Consider Como. That strip of water blends the 
most characteristic Swiss and Italian beauty. From 
the dark and awful shadow of the Snow-Alps which 
brood over its northern extremity, the lake stretches 
under waving vines and shimmering olives, (that 
look as if they grew only by moonlight, said Mrs. 
Jameson’s niece,)—under orange terraces, and lem¬ 
ons and oleanders, under sumptuous chestnuts and 
funereal cypresses and ponderous pines and all that 
they imply of luxurious palaces, marble balusters, 
steps, statues, vases and fountains, undei these and 
through all the imagery of ideal Italy, deep and far 
into the very heart of Southern Italian loveliness. 
And on the shores near the town of Como, among 
the garden paths or hills that overhang the villas, 
you may look from the embrace of Italy straight at 


LAKE GEORGE. 


135 


the eternal snow-peaks of Switzerland—as if on the 
divinest midsummer day your thought could cleave 
the year and behold December as distinctly as June. 

Lake Gomo is the finest combination of natural 
sublimity and beauty with the artistic results which 
that sublimity and beauty have inspired. This is 
the combination essential to a perfect and perma¬ 
nently satisfactory enjoyment in landscape. We 
modern men cannot be satisfied with the satisfaction 
of the savage, nor with that of any partial nature 
and education. 

The landscape must be lonely as well as lovely, if 
it is not sublime. We have a right to require in 
scenery the presence of the improvement which 
Nature there suggested. In the Alps, in Niagara, 
in the Sea, Nature suggests nothing more. They 
are foregone conclusions. No colossal statue carved 
from a cliff, or palace hewn from a glacier, are more 
than curious. Nor can you in any manner improve 
or deepen by Art the essential impression of natural 
features so sublime. 

When I speak of what Art can do for the land¬ 
scape, you will not suppose that I wish Nature to be 
put in order, or that there should be only landscape 
gardens. The wide flowering levels of the Western 
Prairies, rolling in billows of golden blossoms upon 
the horizon, have , a supreme and peculiar beauty, 


136 


LOTUS-EATING. 


which no human touch can improve, and the lonely 
lakes of the Tyrol, dark withdrawn under cliffs that 
do not cease to frown, charmed in weird calm which 
never the scream of wild fowl vexes, these, like the 
Alps and the Ocean, and Niagara, are beyond the 
hope of Art. 

But it is different when Nature gives no landscape 
material, when the forms of hill and shore are mo¬ 
notonous or unimportant of themselves, yet suggest 
a latent possibility of picturesque effects. 

This is not irreverent meddling with Nature, it is 
only following her lead. Has no one observed how 
often the absence of water in the landscape leaves 
the landscape dead? Was never a castle so placed 
upon hill or by river side that it grieved the eye of 
taste ? What I say aims only at removing the occa¬ 
sion of such grief. The inextricable mazes of a forest 
are not imposing when you are entangled among 
them. A boundless forest is only sublime when the 
eye commands it by overlooking it. The forest is 
only the rude grandeur of the block; but the groves 
and gardens which wait upon the civilizing footsteps 
that unravel those mazes—are the graceful statue 
and the fine result. 

So when the Empress said to me, “ Is it not more 
beautiful than Como ?” I said, no. Yet it is impossible 
not to perceive the great capabilities of Lake George. 


LAKE GEOKGE. 


137 


The gleam of mar-/ 
ble palaces, or 
of summer re^ v ' 
treats of any genuine J 
beauty, even—ft 
a margin of 
grain-goldened 


shore. 


or ranges 



whispering rushes beneath 
stately terraces—indeed, any 
amelioration of Nature by 

Art, would perfect the loveliness of ^V 
Lake George, and legitimate the Em- \ " \S 

press’s praises. At present it is in- ‘‘ '• 

vested with none of that enchanted atmosphere of 
romance in which every landscape is more alluring. 
Its interest and charm is the difference between an 
Indian and a Greek, between pigments and a picture. 

Do not suppose that I am maligning so fair an 
object as the lake, even while I regard it as a good 
type of the quality of our landscape, compared with 
the European. Space and wildness are the proper 
praises of American scenery. The American in Eu¬ 
rope, with the blood of a new race and the hope of a 
proportioned future tingling in his veins, with a pro¬ 
found conviction that Niagara annihilates all other 
scenery in the world, and with a decided disposition 



138 


LOTUS-EATING. 


to assert that Niagara is the type of the country, pro¬ 
claims the extent of that country as the final argu¬ 
ment in the discussion of scenery and bears down 
with inland seas and the Father of Waters, and pri¬ 
meval forests and prairies and Andes, to conclude 
his triumph. 

In the general vague vastness of the impression 
produced, this is a genuine triumph. But it is a 
superiority which appeals more to the mind than to 
the eye. The moment you travel in America the 
victory of Europe is sure. For purposes of practical 
pleasure we have no mountains of an alpine sublim¬ 
ity, no lakes of the natural and artificial loveliness 
of the European, although one of ours may be large 
enough to supply all the European lakes. We have 
few rivers of any romantic association, no quaint 
cities, no picturesque costume and customs, no pic¬ 
tures or buildings. We have none of the charms 
that follow long history. We have only vast and 
unimproved extent, and the interest with which the 
possible grandeur of a mysterious future may invest 
it. One would be loth to exhort a European to visit 
America for other reasons than social and political 
observation, or buffalo hunting. We have nothing 
so grand and accessible as Switzerland, nothing so 
beautiful as Italy, nothing so civilized as Paris, noth¬ 
ing so comfortable as England. The idea of the 


LAKE GEORGE. 


139 


great western rivers and of lakes as shoreless to the 
eye as the sea, or of a magnificent monotony of grass 
or forest, is as impressive and much less wearisome 
than the actual sight of them. 

But a charm which is in the variety and the detail, 
as much as in the general character, is only appreci¬ 
able by the eye, and that, of course, is the triumph of 
European scenery. The green valleys of Switzerland 
which relieve and heighten, by contrast, the snowy 
sublimity of the mountains ; the Madonna shrines in 
vineyards and the pretty paraphernalia of religion 
in Italy ; the cultivated comfort of the English land¬ 
scape, in whose parks each tree stands as if it knew 
itself to be the ornament and pride of ancestral 
acres, and the artificial grotesqueness of the French 
chateaux—all these you must see if you would know, 
and your final impression is of a fine aggregate with 
beautiful and characteristic details. 

Then we have no coast scenery. The Mediterra¬ 
nean coast has a character which is unequalled. 
The sea loves Italy and laves it with beauty. It has 
an eternal feud with us. Our shores stretch, shrink¬ 
ing in long, low flats, to the ocean, or recoil in bare, 
gray, melancholy rocks. Our coast is monotonous 
and tame in form, and sandy and dreary in sub¬ 
stance. Trees reluct to grow; fruit yearns for the 
interior; a sad dry moss smooths the rocks and 


140 


LOTUS-EATING. 


solitary spires of grass shiver in the wind. But the 
Italian sea is mountain-shored ; and all over the 
mountain sides the oranges grow, and the tropical 
cactus and vines wave, and a various foliage fringes 
the water. You float at morning and evening on the 
Gulf of Salerno, or the Bay of Naples, and breathe 
an orange-odored air. The vesper bell of the con¬ 
vent on the steep sides of the Salerno mountains 
showers with pious sound the mariners below. They 
wa4ch the campanile as they sail, and a sweetness of 
which their own gardens make part, follows their 
flight. You can fancy nothing more alluring than 
these coasts, and nothing more mysterious and im¬ 
posing than the mountains of Granada looming large 
through the luminous mist of the Spanish shore. 
This last is the scenery of Ossian. 

All this implies one of the grandest and most 
beautiful natural impressions, and one of which our 
own sea-coast is totally destitute. And it is only an 
illustration of the absolute superiority of European 
scenery, in very various ways. The tendency of 
American artists toward Europe as a residence, is 
based not only upon the desire of breathing a social 
atmosphere, in which Art is valued, or of beholding 
the galleries of fame, but also upon the positive want 
of the picturesque in American scenery and life. 
Water, and woods, and sky are not necessarily pictu- 


LAKE GEORGE. 


141 


resque in form, or combination, or color, and here 
again, there must be beautiful details, and the human 
impress of Art upon them, to satisfy the sense that 
craves the picturesque. 

I sat one evening on the cliffs at Newport with 
Mot Notelpa, a friend who wears the onyx ring, of 
which Sterling has written so good a story—and as 
we were discussing America, Mot, the gentleman of 
two hemispheres, said to me : “ America is only a 
splendid exile for the European race.” The saying 
was no less forcible than fine, but I have no room to 
follow its meaning here. He did not say or mean 
that it was a pity to be born an American, or deny 
the compensation which gives us our advantages. 

No man who has traversed Europe with his eyes 
and mind open has failed to see that as our great 
natural advantage is space, so our great social and 
political advantage is opportunity, and every young 
man’s capital the chance of a career. But the race 
as a unit, cultivated to the point of Art, is exiled, 
wherever the laws of-Nature postpone Art. 

You may be sure that I said no such thing to the 
Empress, as in the moonlight she provoked the com¬ 
parison. 

But the “ No” of my reply meant all that. And 
when, the next morning, we steamed in a stiff gale 
from Caldwell to Crown Point, the unhumanized 


LOTUS-EATING. 


142 


solitude of the shores accorded well with the dusky 
legends of Indian wars that haunt the Lake. 

Lake George should be the motto of a song rather 
than the text of a sermon, I know. But it is beauti¬ 
ful enough to make moralizing poetry. It is the 
beauty of a country cousin, the diamond in the rough, 
when compared with the absolute elegance and fas¬ 
cination of Como. Nor will I quarrel with those 
whom the peasant pleases most—especially if they 
have never been to court. 


N A H A N T. 


























































































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September. 



h ! which were best, to roam or rest 1 
The land’s lap or the water’s breast'? 

To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves, 

Or swim in lucid shallows, just 
Eluding water-lily leaves, 

An inch from Death’s black fingers, thrust 
To lock you, whom release he must; 
Which life were best on Summer eves 1 


ISTahant is a shower of little brown cottages, fallen 
upon the rocky promontory that terminates Lynn 
Beach. 


There is a hotel upon its finest, farthest point, 
which was a fashionable resort a score of years since. 
But the beaux and belles have long since retreated 
into the pretty cottages whence they can contemplate 
the hotel, which has the air of a quaint, broad-pi- 
azzad, sea-side hostelry, with the naked ugliness of a 
cotton factory added to it, and fancy it the monu¬ 
ment of merry, but dead old days. 

G 



146 


LOTUS-EATING. 


The hotel is no longer fashionable. Nahant is no 
more a thronged resort. Its own career has not been 
unlike that of the belles who frequented it, for al¬ 
though the hurry and glare and excitement of a 
merely fashionable watering-place are past, there 
has succeeded a quiet, genial enjoyment and satis¬ 
faction, which are far pleasanter. Some sunny morn¬ 
ing, when your memory is busy with Willis’s sparkling 
stories of Nahant life a quarter of a century ago, and 
with all the pleasant tales you may have collected in 
your wanderings, from those who were a part of that 
life, then step over with some friend, whose maturity 
may well seem to you the flower of all that the poet 
celebrated in the bud, and she will reanimate the 
spacious and silent piazza with the forms that have 
made it famous. And ever as you stroll and listen, 
your eyes will wander across the irregular group of 
cottages, and prohibit your fancying that the ro¬ 
mance is over. 

This is a kind of sentiment inseparable from spots 
like this. They concentrate, during a brief time, so 
many and such various persons, and unite them so 
closely in the constant worship and pursuit of a com¬ 
mon pleasure, that the personal association with the 
spot becomes profound ; and when the space is very 
limited, as at Nahant, even painful. It is not sur¬ 
prising, therefore, that many who loved and fre- 


NAHANT. 


147 


quented Valiant years ago, now recoil from it, and 
only visit it with the same fascinated reluctance with 
which they regard the faded lo.ve-tokens of years so 
removed that they seem to have detached themselves 
from life. This will explain to you much of the sur¬ 
prise with which Bostonians listen to your praises of 
Hahant. “Is any thing left?” say their smiles and 
looks ; “ it is a cup we drained so long ago.” 

Yet no city has an ocean-gallery, so near, so con¬ 
venient and rapid of access, so complete and satis¬ 
factory in characteristics of the sea, as Boston in 
Hahant. 

You step upon the steamer in the city and in less 
than an hour you land at Hahant, and breathe the 
untainted air from the “boreal pole,” and gaze upon 
a sublime sea-sweep, which refreshes the mind as the 
air the lungs. You find no village, no dust, no com¬ 
motion. You encounter no crowds of carriages or 
of curious and gossiping people. Ho fast men in 
velvet coats are trotting fast horses. You meet none 
of the disagreeable details of a fashionable watering- 
place, but a sunny silence broods over the realm of 
little brown cottages. They stand apart at easy dis¬ 
tances, each with its rustic piazza, with vines climbing 
and blooming about the columns, with windows and 
doors looking upon the sea. 

In the midst of the clusters, where roads meet, 


148 


LOTUS-EATING 


stands a small Temple, a church of graceful propor¬ 
tions, but unhappily clogged with wings. It is the 
only Catholic Church I know, for all services arc 
held there in rotation, from the picturesque worship 
of the Homan faith to the severest form of Protes¬ 
tantism. The green land slopes away behind the 
Temple to a row of willows in a path across the 
field, whence you can not see the ocean, and it is so 
warm and sheltered, like an inland dell, that the 
sound of the sea comes to it only as a pleasant 
fancy. 

This pretty path ends in the thickest part of the 
settlement. Put even here it has no village air. It 
is still, and there are no shops, and the finest trees 
upon the promontory shadow the road that gradually 
climbs the hill, and then, descending, leads you across 
little Nahant to Lynn Beach. The area of Nahant 
is very small. From almost any cottage porch you 
survey the whole scene. But it has these two great 
advantages for a summer sojourn ; an air of entire 
repose, for there seems to be no opportunity or con¬ 
venience for any other than a life of leisure, and the 
perpetual presence of the sea. 

At Nahant you can not fancy poverty or labor. 
Their appearance is elided from the landscape. Tak¬ 
ing the tone of your reverie from the peaceful little 
Temple and glancing over the simple little houses, 


NAHANT. 


149 


with the happy carelessness of order in their distri¬ 
bution, and the entire absence of smoke, dust, or din, 
you must needs dream that Pericles and Aspasia 
have withdrawn from the capital, with a choice court 
of friends and lovers, to pass a month of Grecian 
gaiety upon the sea. The long day swims by nor 
disturbs that dream. If haply upon the cliffs at sun¬ 
set, straying by “ the loud-sounding sea,” you catch 
glimpses of a figure, .whose lofty loveliness would 
have inspired a sweeter and statelier tone in that old 
verse, you feel only that you have seen Aspasia, and 
Aspasia as the imagination beholds her, and are not 
surprised; or a head wreathed with folds of black 
splendor varies that pure Greek rhythm with a Span¬ 
ish strain,—or cordial Saxon smiles and ringing 
laughter dissolve your Grecian dream into a western 
reality. 

For its sea, too, Nahant is unsurpassed. You can 
not escape the Ocean here. It is in your eye and in 
your ear forever. At Newport the Ocean is a luxury. 
You live away from it and drive to it as you drive 
to the Lake at Saratoga, and in the silence of mid¬ 
night as you withdraw from the polking parlor, you 
hear it calling across the solitary fields, wailing over 
your life and wondering at it. At Nahant the sea is 
supreme. The place is so small that you can not 
build your house out of sight of the Ocean, and to 


150 


LOTUS-EATING. 


watch the splendid play of its life, is satisfaction and 
enjoyment enough. Many of the cottages are built 
directly on the rocks of the shore. Of course there 
are few trees, except the silver poplar, which thrives 
luxuriantly in the salt air, and which, waving in the 
fresh wind and turning its glistening leaves to the 
sun, is like a tree in perpetual blossom. Flowers are 
cherished about some of the houses, and they have 
an autumnal gorgeousness and are doubly dear and 
beautiful on the edge of the salt sea waste. 

The air which the ocean breathes over the spot is 
electrical. No other ocean-air is so exhilarating. 
After breakfast at Nahant, said Mot, I feel like 
Coeur de Lion, and burn to give battle to the Sara 
cens. But the brave impulse ends in smoke, and 
musing and chatting, and building castles in the 
clouds, you loiter away the day upon the piazza, end¬ 
ing by climbing about the cliffs at sunset or galloping 
over the beach. Thus the ocean and the cliffs are 
the natural glories of Nahant, and the sky which you 
see as from the deck of a ship, and which adequately 
completes the simple outline of the world as seen 
from those rocks. 

The cliffs are imposing. They are the jagged 
black edges of rock with which the promontory tears 
the sea. Chased by the tempests beyond, the ocean 
dashes in and leaping upon the rocks lashes them 


NAHANT. 


151 



with the fury of its scorn. In a great gale the whole 
sea drives upon Eahant. 

One day the storm came, sullen and showery from 
the East, scudding in blinding mists over the sea, 
breaking towards the blue,—struggling, wailing, 
howling, losing the blue again, with a sharper chill 
in its breath and a drearier dash of the surf. Then 


an awful lull, an impenetrable mist, and the hoarse 
gathering roar of the ocean. The day darkened, and 
sudden sprays of rain, like volleys of sharp arrows, 
rattled gustily against the windows, and dull, boom¬ 
ing thunder was flattened and dispersed in the thick 
moisture of the air. But in the gust and pauses of 
the wind and rain, the bodeful roar of the sea was 



152 


LOTUS-EATING. 


constant and increasing. The water was invisible, 
except in the long flashing lines of surf that moment¬ 
ly plunged from out the gray gloom of the fog, and 
that surf was like the advancing lines of an unknown 
enemy flinging itself upon the shore. Behind was 
the mighty rush of multitudinous waters, but more 
awful to imagination than any mere natural sound 
could be, for all the dead and lost, all who sailed 
and never came to shore, all who dreamed, and 
hoped, and struggled, and went down, and a world 
of joy with them; all their woe was in the Ocean’s 
wail, the death shriek of as much happiness as lives. 
So the storm gathered terribly over the sea, in terror 
commensurate with the sea’s vastness, and beat upon 
Naliant like a hail of fire upon a besieged citadel. 

The next day, as children seek upon a battle-field, 
the buttons and ornaments that adorned the heroes, 
there were figures bending along the shore, to find 
the delicate, almost impalpable mosses, which the 
agony of the sea tosses up, as fragments of song 
drop from the torture of the heart. The mosses are 
pressed and cherished in volumes, each of which is a 
book of songs—of the airiest fancies—of the aptest 
symbols—of the delicatest dreams of the sea.- Noth¬ 
ing in nature is more touching and surprising, noth¬ 
ing more richly reveals her tenderness than these 
fair-threaded and infinitely various sea-weeds and 


NAHANT. 


153 


mosses. They are the still, small voices, in which is 
the Lord. 

Longfellow has sung all this in wave-dancing music: 

So when storms of wild emotion, 

Strike the Ocean 

Of the poet’s soul, ere long 

From each cave and rocky fastness, 

In its vastness, 

Floats some fragment of a Song. 

From the far off Isles enchanted, 

Heaven has planted 

With the golden fruit of Truth; 

From the flashing surf, whose vision 
Gleams Elysian 

In the tropic clime of Youth. 

From the strong will and the endeavor, 

That forever 

Wrestles with the tides of Fate; 

From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered, 
Tempest-shattered, 

Floating waste and desolate. 

Ever-drifting, drifting, drifting, 

On the shifting 

Currents of the restless heart; 

Till at length in hooks recorded, 

They, like hoarded 

Household words, no more depart. 

Nahant would not satisfy a New Yorker, nor, in¬ 
deed, a Bostonian, whose dreams of sea-side summer¬ 
ing are based upon Newport life. The two places 
are entirely different. It is not quite true that New¬ 
port has all of Nahant and something more. For 


154 


LOTUS-EATING. 


the repose, the freedom from the fury of fashion, is 
precisely what endears Nahant to its lovers, and the 
very opposite is the characteristic of Newport. 

Nahant is northern in character, and Newport is 
southern. The winds blow cool over Nahant, and 
you think of the North Sea, and Norsemen, and Vi¬ 
kings, and listen to the bracing winds as to Sagas. 

Yet, if a man had any work to do, Nahant opens 
its arms to him, and folds him into the sweetest si¬ 
lence and seclusion. It has no variety, I grant. You 
stroll along the cliffs, and you gallop upon the beach, 
and there is nothing more. But he is a Tyro in the 
observation of Nature, who does not know that, by 
the sea, it is the sky-scape and not the landscape in 
which enjoyment lies. If a man dwelt in the vicinity 
of beautiful inland scenery, yet near the sea, his 
horse’s head would be turned daily to the ocean, for 
the sea and sky are exhaustless in interest as in beau¬ 
ty, while, in the comparison, you soon drink up the 
little drop of satisfaction in fields and trees. The 
sea externally fascinates by its infinite suggestion, 
and every man upon the sea-shore is still a Julian or 
a Maddalo: 

-“because the sea 

Is boundless as we wish our souls to be.” 

Besides, it is always the ocean which is the charm 



NAHANT. 


155 


of other shore resorts, that have more variety than 
Nahant. Even at Newport the eye is unsatisfied 
until it rests upon the sea, and as sea-side scenery 
with us is monotonous, there is rather more of the 
same thing at Newport than a greater variety. The 
genuine objection to Nahant is the feeling of its dul- 
ness, on the part of the young, and of its intense 
sadness of association with the elders. 

The air is full of ghosts to them. At twilight they 
see figures glide pallid along the cliffs, and hear 
vague voices singing airy songs by moonlight in the 
rocky caves of the shore. Every stone, every turn is 
so familiar, that the absence of the look and the 
word, w T hich in memory are integral parts of every 
rock and turn, sharpen the sense of change into acute 
sorrow. 

Nor to the visitor of to-day, who hears the stories 
of old Nahant days as he reads romances, is it possi¬ 
ble to watch without tenderness of thought, even 
without a kind of sadness,fif you will, the pleasant 
evening promenade along the Lynn Beach. They 
bound over the beach in the favoring sunset, those 
graceful forms, fresh and unworn as the sea that 
breaks languidly beside them and slips smoothly to 
their horses’ hoofs. I do not wonder that it slips so 
softly toward them and touches their flight as with a 
musing kiss. I do not wonder that it breaks balmily 


156 


LOTUS-EATING. 


upon their cheeks, and lifts their hair as lightly as 
if twilight spirits were toying with their locks. I do 
not wonder that as they turn homeward in the moon¬ 
light and leave the sea alone, it calls gently after 
them and fills the air with soft sounds as they retire, 
nor that it rises and rises until it has gathered into 
its bosom the light tracks they left upon the shore. 
The sea knows the brevity of that glad bound along 
the beach. These are not the first, they shall surely 
not be the last, and while itself shall stay forever 
fresh and unworn as now, there shall be furrows 
ploughed elsewhere which even its waves can never 
smooth. 

The evenings at Nahant have a strange fascination. 
There are no balls, no hops, no concerts, no congre¬ 
gating under any pretence in hotel parlors. The 
damp night air is still, or throbs with the beating sea. 
The Nahanters sit upon their piazzas and watch the 
distant lighthouse or the gleam of a lantern upon a 
sail. Gradually they retire. Lights fade from the 
windows. Before midnight, silence and darkness 
are supreme. But we who remembered Sorrento 
loved the midnight, and, singing barcaroles, dreamed 
our dreams. 

One night we sang no longer, but lost in silence 
watched the bay as if it had been the bay of Naples, 
when the sudden burst of a distant serenade filled 


NAHANT. 


157 


the midnight. It was the golden crown of delight. 
The long, wailing, passionate strains floated around 
us, as if our own thoughts had grown suddenly 
audible, and the vague sadness, the nameless and 
inexpressible fascination of midnight music utterly 
enthralled us. Nothing but the music lived; the 
world was its own; we floated upon it, drifted hither 
and thither as it would. There was no moon, but 
the serenade was moonlight. There were no gardens 
to sweeten the night, but the music was a bower of 
Persian roses thronged with nightingales. Songs of 
Mendelssohn—the Adelaide of Beethoven—Irish 
melodies, whatever was melancholy, and exquisite, 
and meet for the hour and the spot, pulsed towards 
us upon the night,—and last of all, a wild, sweet, 
pensive strain, for which surely Shelley meant his 
lines: 


I arise from dreams of thee, 

In the first sweet sleep of night, 
When the winds are breathing low, 
And the stars are shining bright. 
I arise from dreams of thee, 

And a spirit in my feet, 

Has led me—who knows howl 
To thy chamber window, sweet! 

The wandering airs they faint 
On the dark, the silent stream— 
The champak odors fail 
Like sweet thoughts in a dream; 


158 


LOTUS-EATING. 


The Nightingale’s complaint, 

It dies upon her heart, 

As I must on thine, 

Beloved as thou art. 

0 lift me from the ground, 

I die, I faint, I fail! 

Let thy Love in kisses rain 
On my lips and eyelids pale. 

My cheek is cold, and white, alas! 

My heart beats loud and fast, 

Oh! press it close to thine again, 

Where it will break at last. 

At Nahant you shall live with the sea and sky and 
yet not lose that pleasant social intercourse, which 
has a secret sweeter than the sea or the sky can 
whisper. Society at Nahant does not imply the 
Polka, indeed, that last perfection of civilization, but 
regard it, if you choose, as the ante-chamber to the 
ball-room of Newport, where you may breathe the 
fresh air awhile, and collect your thoughts, and see 
the ocean and the stars, and remember with regret 
the days when happiness was in something else than 
a dance, the days when you dared to dream. 

Nor be surprised, if, as you linger on those cliffs, 
remembering, one of the ghosts the elders see should 
lay his light hand upon your shoulder, and whisper 
as the sun sets. 

Break, break, break, 

On tby cold gray stones, 0 Sea! 

And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 


NAHANT. 


359 



0 well for the fisher boy, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay, 
0 well for the sailor lad, 

That he shouts with his sister at play. 


And the stately ships go on, 

To their haven under the hill; 

But 0 for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a Voice that is still. 


Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, 0 Sea! 

But the tender grace of a day that is fled. 
Will never come back to me. 





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NEWPORT. 





X. 



SEPTEMBER. 


he Golden Rods begin to flame 
the road-sides, and in the pleas¬ 
ant gardens of Newport. The 
gorgeous dahlias and crisp asters 
^marshal the autumnal splendor of 
the year. All day long, Herrick’s 
’’^Valedictory to the Summer has 
oeen singing itself in my mind : 





Fair daffodils, we weep to see 
You haste away so soon, 

As yet the early-rising Sun 
Has not attained his noon. 
Stay, stay, 

Until the hastening day 
Has run; 

But to the even song, 

And having prayed together, we 
Will go with you along! 



164 


LOTUS-EATING. 


We have short time to stay as you, 
We have as short a Spring, 

As quick a growth to meet decay, 
As you or any thing. 

We die 

As your hours do; and dry 
Away 

Like to the Summer’s rain, 

Or as the pearls of morning-dew, 
Ne’er to he found again. 


The first chill breath of September has blown away 
the froth of fashion, and the cottagers anticipate 
with delight the cool serenity of the shortening days. 
The glory has utterly gone from that huge, yellow 
pagoda-factory, the Ocean House. The drop has 
fallen, the audience is departed, the lights are ex¬ 
tinguished, and it were only to be wished that the 
house might vanish with the season, and not haunt 
“ the year’s last hours” with that melancholy aspect 
of a shrineless, deserted temple. 

I fear, however, that not only the glory of a sea¬ 
son, but of success, has left the “ Ocean.” The flame 
of fashion which burned there a year or two since, 
burned too intensely to last. The fickle goddess, 
whose temple it is, is already weary of democratic, 
congregational worship and affects the privacy of 
separate oratories. They rise on every hand. For 
fashion dwells in cottages now, and the hotel season 
is brief and not brilliant. The cottagers will come, 


NEWPORT. 


165 


indeed, and hear the Germania play, and hop in the 
parlor; but *they come as from private palaces to a 
public hall, and disappear again into the magnificent 
mystery of “ cottage life.” 

When I first knew Newport it was a southern re¬ 
sort for the summer. The old Bellevue, and the 
present Touro House, then Whitfield’s, sufficed for 
the strangers. It was before the Polka—before the 
days of music after dinner—and when the word 
“ hop” was unknown even at Saratoga. Every body 
bathed in those days, and all bathed together. There 
was a little bowling, some driving and riding, but no 
fast horses or fast men—above all, no fast women. 
The area on the hill, of which the Ocean House is 
the centre, was an unsettled region. There were not 
a dozen cottages, and the quaint little town dozed 
quietly along its bay, dreaming only of the southern 
silence, which the character of the climate and of the 
visitors, who were mainly southerners, naturally 
suggested. 

Newport was the synonyme of repose. An in¬ 
genious commentator would surely have traced the 
Yan Winkles to a Newport origin, although as 
surely, the “ Rip” was a soubriquet of prophetic 
omen. 

In those good old days New York loved Saratoga, 
and Newport was a name of no significance: but 


166 


LOTUS-EATING. 


the Diana of that Ephesus looked suddenly seaward, 
and a flood tide of fashion rose along Narragansett 
Bay, and overflowed Newport. 

Singular are the deposits it left and is leaving. 
This amorphous “Ocean this Grecian “Atlantic 
this “Bellevue” enlarged out of all recognizable pro¬ 
portions ; this whirl of fashionable equipages, these 
hats and coats, this confused din of dancing music, 
scandal, flirtation, serenades, and supreme voice of 
the sea breaking through the fog and dust; this sing¬ 
ing, dancing, and dawdling incessantly; this crush¬ 
ing into a month in the country that which crowds 
six months in town—these are the foot-prints of 
Fashion upon the sea-shore—these the material with 
which we build the golden statue to our Diana. 

Beyond doubt, Newport is the great watering-place 
of the country. And as such, as assembling yearly 
the allied army of fashionable forces from every 
quarter, it is the most satisfactory point from which 
to review the host and mark the American aspect of 
Fashion. 

A very little time will reveal its characteristic to be 
exaggeration. The intensity, which is the natural at¬ 
tribute of a new race, and which finds in active busi¬ 
ness its due direction, and achieves there its truest 
present success, becomes ludicrous in the social sphere, 
because it has no taste and no sense of propriety. 


NEWPORT. 


167 


Society is as much a sphere of art as any of the 
more recognized spheres. To he rich, and to visit 
certain persons, no more fits a man or woman for 
society, than to he twenty years old and to have a 
palette fits him to he an artist. When, therefore, a 
boy embarks in business at ten years of age and re¬ 
tires a man at forty or fifty with a fortune, he is in 
the situation of one who in the passionate pursuit of 
the means has put the end out of his attainment. He 
has been so long making his shoes that by inaction 
his feet are withered, and he can not walk. Yet 
the same man, who can never be an addition or an 
ornament to society, which demands the harmonious 
play of rare gifts, shall be very eminent and useful 
in that active life which requires the stern labor of 
very different powers. 

Thus, as wealth is a primal necessity of society, 
because giving it a pedestal, and allowing its gen¬ 
erous whims and fancies full play, so wherever 
wealth is not an antecedent, but must be acquired, 
the force and maturity of talent will always be swal¬ 
lowed up in the pedestal, and the statue will be light 
and imperfect, or, what is worse, an imbecile imita¬ 
tion. In a society formed under such circumstances, 
wealth will always enjoy an unnatural and undigni¬ 
fied consideration. 

How the test of a man is his manner of using 


168 


LOTUS-EATING. 


means, not of acquiring them. Any adroit laborer 
can quarry marble, but how many men could have 
wrought the Apollo or the Yenus ? And how many 
men who have made fortunes spend money well ? 

I do not imply that they are not generous, and 
even lavish; but how’ much does the expenditure 
advance the great common interests of men? In 
this country where fortunes are yearly made and 
spent, what results of that spending have we to show ? 
We have carriages, and upholstery, and dinners, and 
elaborate houses, and the waistcoats of Young Amer¬ 
ica blaze with charms, and it returns from “ abroad” 
wi.th a knowledge of Parisian tailoring and haber¬ 
dashery, which would be invaluable in the first 
Broadway establishment interested in those matters. 

But consider that we get few pictures, statues, 
buildings, gardens, or parks, for the money we spend; 
consider that no rich man has yet thought to endow 
this country with a musuem of casts, like the Meng’s 
Museum in Dresden, by which we should have all 
the finest sculptures of every age in the most perfect¬ 
ly accurate copy, only differing from the original in 
the material. 

“ I have made my money, and I am not going to 
throw it away,” is the response of Croesus to any 
such suggestion ; and he builds a house in the most 
fashionable street rather larger than his neighbor’s, 


NEWPORT. 


169 


but a reproduction of it in every upholstering de¬ 
tail. 

Fine plate and glass, and Louis Quinze and Louis 
Quatorze deformities follow, and Croesus, Jr. has a 
pair of 2 40’s, and a wagon of weight proportioned 
to the calibre of that young gentleman; and, as he 
dashes up the Newport dust, some cynical pedestrian 
Timon, whitened and blinded by that dust, can not 
help inquiring if this is the best statue that could be 
wrought out of all the marble old Croesus quarried! 

The houses, and horses, and carriages are not to 
be derided; for, as I said already, these are the 
pedestal; they are the matters of course. But to 
the eye of the money-making genius, they are valua¬ 
ble for themselves, and not as means, and there is 
the necessary mistake of a society so constituted. If 
a man buys a luxurious carpet, not that his friends 
may tread softly and their sense be soothed, but that 
it may proclaim his ability to buy the carpet,.that it 
may say with green and red and yellow emphasis— 
“ at least twenty thousand a year”—it is no longer 
beautiful, and you feel the presence of a man who is 
mastered by his means, and to whom any other man 
with a larger rent roll will be respectable and awful. 

From all this spring the ludicrous details of our 
society. We dress too well; we dance too well: we 
are too gracious and graceful : our entertainments 
H 


170 


LOTUS-EATING. 



arc too elegant; our modesty degenerates into pru¬ 
dery and bad taste; we are u smart,” but not witty ; 
flasby, but not gay.—Young America is too young. 
Its feet are beautifully small, and the head is pro¬ 
portioned to them. Society is only a ball. The heels 
have carried it against the head ; and why not, since 
the education and daily life of the youth fits him for 
little else than shaking his heels adroitly. 

We dance because we are unable to talk. The 
novels of foreign society fascinate us by their tales 
of a new sphere. Where are such women, we say, 
where such men? We fancy it is the despairing 
dream of a romance, but it is really the fact of 
foreign life.—We are very chivalric; no nation 
reaches our point of courtly devotion to woman as 
woman. But our chivalry is not entirely unfeuda- 




NEWPORT. 171 

lized; our courtliness does not always indicate re- 
spectful intercourse. 

When I say that we dance too well, I speak of the 
disproportion of those performances to the rest of our 
social achievements. A fool crowned is doubly fool¬ 
ish. Fine dressing and dexterous dancing, when not 
subsidiary to the effect of personal beauty and char¬ 
acter, are monstrous. Every girl who dances grace¬ 
fully, should, in speaking, show that she is of graceful 
and winning nature. If she does not—if she is silly 
and simpers—you instinctively feel that her move¬ 
ment is artificial; that it is the gift of the dancing 
school, not a grace of nature; you have been de¬ 
ceived, and it is never again a pleasure to watch 
that dancing. 

What is high society but the genial intercourse of 
the highest • intelligences with which we converse ? 
It is the festival of Wit and Beauty and Wisdom. 
Its conversation is a lambent light playing over all 
subjects, as the torch is turned upon each statue in 
the gallery. It is not an arena for dispute. Courts 
and Parliaments are for debate. Its hall of reunion, 
whether Holland House, or Charles Lamb’s parlor, 
or Schiller’s garret, or the Tuileries, is a palace of 
pleasure. Wine, and flowers, and all successes of art, 
delicate dresses studded with gems, and graceful 
motion to passionate and festal music, are its orna- 


172 


LOTUS-EATING. 


ments and arabesqned outlines. It is a tournament 
wherein the force of the hero is refined into the grace 
of the gentleman—a masque, in which womanly sen¬ 
timent blends with manly thought. This is the noble 
idea of society, a harmonious play of the purest 
powers. Nothing less than this satisfies the demand 
^ suggested by human genius and beauty, and the 
splendid sphere of the world in which they are 
placed. 

Yes, you say, and how much of all this have you 
found in Newport. 

At least I have found the form of it; and he must 
have travelled in vain, who could not see, on some 
Grecian summer morning, even thus late in time, 
Alcibiades heading, with silken sails, for the Peireus, 
or here in Newport the features of a truly fine socie¬ 
ty through the fog of fashion. 

The very exaggeration we have remarked betrays 
a tendency as well as a failure. When we have 
gone through our present discipline of French and 
English social bullying, from the shape of our shoes 
up to that of our opinions, we shall be the stronger 
to take the field for ourselves. Yet I doubt if in any 
country in which wealth is not hereditary, so that a 
permanent and large class is secure from the neces¬ 
sity of some kind of gold digging, whereby man be¬ 
comes of the earth, earthy, there can ever be the 


NEWPORT. 


173 


simplest and finest tone of society. The aggregate 
will be better, but will the single specimens be as 
good ? 

I do not insist upon it. It is a speculation. Yet, 
perhaps, this perfection of the individual is the jewel 
in the toad’s head—the real result of the elaborate 
aristocratic organization of the old world, which, I 
grant, was too cumbrous an operation for such a 
result. 

The old mystery, myth, fable, fancy, or whatever 
else, that labor came by the fall, will still suggest 
itself. We make the best of a bad case, and poets 
and philosophers speculate how to make labor “ at¬ 
tractive.” But the end of our labor is, all the while, 
to dispense with labor. 

“ You lazy fellow,” says the working merchant to 
his friend who was an heir. u But why are you 
working,” retorts the heir upon the merchant, “ but 
to secure the laziness I enjoy?” 

At all events, hard labor, in any fair sense of the 
word, is incompatible with the finest beauty, whether 
personal or intellectual, and therefore with the most 
delicate bloom of society. But we Americans are 
workers by the nature of the case, or sons of laborers, 
who spend foolishly what they wisely won. And, 
therefore, New York, as the social representative of 
the country, has more than the task of Sisyphus. It 


174 


LOTUS-EATING. 


aims, and hopes, and struggles, and despairs, to 
make wealth stand for wit, wisdom and beauty. In 
vain it seeks to create society by dancing, dressing, 
and dining, by building fine houses and avoiding the 
Bowery. Fine society is not exclusive, does not 
avoid, but all that does not belong to it drops away 
like water from a smooth statue.—We are still peas¬ 
ants and parvenues, although we call each other 
princes and build palaces. Before we are three 
centuries old we are endeavoring to surpass, by imi¬ 
tating, the results of all art and civilization and so¬ 
cial genius beyond the sea. By elevating the stand¬ 
ard of expense, we hope to secure select society, but 
have only aggravated the necessity of a labor inte¬ 
grally fatal to the kind of society we seek. 

It would be unfortunate if we were all drones, and 
it is foolish for any man to speak of labor in general 
as inimical to society. But I speak of that labor 
which is really drudgery, which is unfair to a man’s 
intellectual nature. Hans Sachs was a shoemaker, 
but it is no less true that incessant hammering of 
sole leather also hammers the cobbler’s just devel¬ 
opment away. 

One extreme is as bad as the other. The drudge 
whose life is drained away in the inexorable toil of a 
mine or a factory, is as sad an object as the prodi¬ 
gal, whom wealth softens into imbecility. The polar 


NEWPORT. 


175 


zone freezes, the tropics burn, the realms of the equa¬ 
tor sleep in golden calm between. 

Fine Society is a fruit that ripens slowly. "We 
Americans fancy we can bu}^ it. But you might as 
well go to market for fresh peaches in January. 
Noble aims and sincere devotion to them—the high¬ 
est development of mind and heart—the fine aroma 
of cultivation which springs from the intimacy with 
all that human genius has achieved in every kind— 
simplicity and integrity—a' soul whose sweetness 
overflows in the manner and makes the voice win¬ 
ning and the movement graceful—here is the recipe 
for fine society, and although much of this is impos¬ 
sible, as for instance, high and various cultivation, 
without wealth, yet wealth of itself cannot supply the 
lowest element. The wealth of a foolish man is a 
pedestal which the more he accumulates elevates 
him higher, and reveals his deformity to a broader 
circle. 

These most obvious facts are rarely remembered. 
Gilded vulgarity believes itself to be gold. But in 
vain we “cut” and discriminate and eschew, now 
warmly here and coldly there, as if many a Marquis 
of unsullied blood, did not dine for ten cents in 
Florence, and lie abed while his shirt was washed, 
and then enter the saloons of fashion as a King his 
Council Chamber. 


176 


LOTUS-EATING. 


We separate and exclude, as if some fine morning 
the little blackamoor of a sweep would not climb 
down the chimney, and fall naturally asleep on the 
Dest bed, soot and all, though he may never have 
touched linen since the sheets of his cradle. 

We Americans are gifted with the talent of getting 
rich. But the money-getting is not the money¬ 
spending genius, and the former nourishes a love of 
wealth as an end, which is a love fatal to society. 
We are not peculiar in our regard for money, but 
we are in the exclusiveness of our regard for it. 
Wealth will socially befriend a man at Newport or 
Saratoga, better than at any similar spot in the world, 
and that is the severest censure that could be passed 
upon those places. 

But life at Newport is not all moralizing, even with 
the cynical Timons of which I spoke, and if you will 
regard this chapter as our chat after dinner, upon 
the piazza, in the next we will stroll in the pleasant 
places of Newport. 


NEWPORT, AGAIN. 






XL 


Mmyut, again. 



September. 

his Island was originally called 
Rhode Island from some fancied 
resemblance in its climate to that of the 
Isle of Rhodes. I do not wonder at 
^Ir^the suggestion, for Newport is washed 
" by a southern sea and the air that 
breathes over it is soft and warm. Its climate is an 
Italian air. These are Mediterranean days. They have 
the luxurious languor of the South. Only the mo¬ 
notonous and melancholy coast reminds you that you 
are not gazing upon Homer’s sea, and that the wind 
is not warmed by African sands. All day—if you 
have been in Italy and know its Southern shore,— 
you look for the orange groves and vineyards; all 
night you listen for the barcaroles. 

I heard a simple and natural explanation of the 


180 


LOTUS-EATING. 


softness of the Newport climate, which attributed it 
to the immediate neighborhood of the Gulf Stream. 
The current suddenly diverges westward near the 
Island, and, according to the story, actually touches 
it. Hence the warmer weather and softer airs here 
than at spots not far removed, especially Nahant. 
Upon leaving Newport the line of the Gulf Stream 
stretches westward, leaving a broad space of sea 
between itself and the Massachusetts shore, into 
which flows the cold water from the north, by which 
the winds warmed over the current are again chilled, 
and blow into Massachusetts Bay with the sharp 
sting that gives a name to Boston east winds. Yast 
quantities of sea-weed are driven in upon the New¬ 
port coast, also indicating the neighborhood of the 
Gulf Stream. If I do not mistake, this course is laid 
down in Maury’s chart. 

But from whatever cause, the climate of Newport 
is very bland and beautiful. It is called bracing, 
but it is only pure. From the higher land of the in¬ 
terior of the island you may see the ocean, any sunny 
day, basking and sparkling in the light, seemingly 
girding the island with a broad visible belt of warmth 
If you see it across smooth, lawn-like slopes, with a 
cluster of trees, as towards the Spouting Horn, it 
will fascinate you no less than Undine w T as fascina¬ 
ted, and draw you to the shore. Follow it and incline 


NEWPOKT. 


181 


toward the Fort. Pass the numerous gates, gallop 
along the hard avenue toward Bateman’s, and push 
on to the shore beyond. Then slowly pace along the 
rocky marge. 

The waves tumble in here, fresh and full from the 
mid-sea. To the right is the southern shore of the 
mainland, and by the light-house upon Beaver-Tail 
pass the sloops and schoon'ers heading toward Long 
Island Sound. It is not a friendly coast; for at a 
little distance in the sea the waves break and foam 
over hidden rocks. That ledge is Brenton’s Beef, 
and here in the sand, on the very shore, stand two 
head stones, side by side. Their silence tells the 
same story as the fretfulness of the rock-rent waves 
beyond. If you can cross a stream that intervenes, 
and are not appalled by stone walls, you may still 
keep the shore, and skirting Lily Pond which has 
the stern aspect of a solitary mountain tarn, and is 
only separated from the sea by a strip of sand, you 
emerge upon the crescent beach of the Spouting 
Horn, a throat of rock in the cliff, through which, 
from a narrow cave below, the water, during storms, 
is forced some forty or fifty feet into the air. 

Just beyond the Spouting Horn is the southern 
point of the Island. It is a rocky bluff 1 , planted now 
in corn, but from the highest point commanding an 
unobstructed horizon, including the town removed 


182 


LOTUS-EATING. 



into picturesque dis¬ 
tance, and the inter¬ 
reaches of 
field, sprink¬ 
led with occasion¬ 
al groups of trees. 
The cliffs around 
the Spouting 
•• Horn are mag¬ 
nificent ocean features, and 
the shore of the mainland 
_ _ is visible. The sea-sweep en¬ 
folds all, satisfying eye and mind. 

This is the true site of a Newport 
residence. The situation suggests a 
cottage of the same general character 
as the Nahant houses. No one could 
go beyond you, no one could interfere, 
and, in the present rapid settlement 
of the island, it will not be long before it is occu¬ 
pied. A little farther on are the finest cliffs in 
Newport, upon which, after southerly storms, the 
sea dashes itself in magnificent surfs that set the 
shore in flashing foam. These are the haunts of 
the bass fishers. We have left our horses behind, 
for there is only a foot-path along the cliffs, and 
walls and fences must be scaled. But by a hap- 




NEWPORT. 


183 


py old condition of the sale of these lands, the path 
will long remain public. For when the colonists 
took the land from the Indians, a right of way 
along the sea w T as secured to them forever, for fish¬ 
ing and the gathering of sea-weed. At least so runs 
the tradition at Newport, and the convenient stiles 
and holes in the walls, even upon properties already 
settled, confirm its practical truth. 

—Or is it only, perhaps, that no man upon this 
pleasant island feels that he has the right to exclude 
others from the sea-shore,—the sea, like the air, 
being the only unquestioned universal heritage in 
Nature ? The fields upon the cliffs are flat and tree¬ 
less. A dry, crisp grass carpets them quite to the 
edge of the precipice. It is thus the finest ocean- 
walk, for it is elevated sufficiently for the eye to 
command the water, and is soft and grateful to the 
feet, like inland pastures. No enterprise has yet 
perceived that the true situation for a Newport hotel 
is upon these cliffs. A broad piazza over the sea 
would brook no rival in attraction, and the citizen 
who sought the place for the ocean air, and the ocean 
view, would not turn without a sigh, back into the 
dusty road, upon which stands, out of the ocean’s 
sight and sound, the glaring, amorphous pile which 
is his home for the nonce. 

In the serene beauty of September weather, the 


184 


LOTUS-EATING. 


cliffs are doubly beautiful. Fashion, the Diana of 
the Summer Solstice, is dethroned; that golden 
statue is shivered, and its fragments cast back into 
the furnace of the city, to be again fused and 
moulded; and out of the whirring dust and din 
the loiterer emerges into the meditative autumnal 
air. 

“A feeling of sadness,” says Coleridge, “a pecu¬ 
liar melancholy, is wont to take possession of me 
alike in Spring and in Autumn. But in Spring it is 
the melancholy of hope; in Autumn it is the melan¬ 
choly of resignation.” Strolling among these dry 
fields, upon the sea, you may perceive plainly enough 
the difference. In the beginning of the month, a 
cluster of days, like a troop of tropical birds, with 
fiery breath and plumage, breathed torrid airs over 
the island. It was the final ecstasy and festival of 
summer. But a huge, black cloud gathered one 
Saturday afternoon, and with lightning and flooding 
rain dispersed those tropical estrays, and left us cool 
and quiet, mind and body, in the rich, yellow, au¬ 
tumnal light. 

Among those dry fields I ramble in these delicious 
but melancholy days, looking at the sea and again 
babbling Herrick, whose few good verses, among all 
that he wrote, are like the few drops of vino (Toro —- 
wine of gold—distilled from the must of Lebanon 


NEWPORT. 


185 


Vineyards. What pastoral sweetness and genuine 
personality of feeling in this poem. 

TO MEADOWS. 

Ye have been fresh and green; 

Ye have been filled with flowers: 

And ye the walks have been, 

Where maids have spent their hears. 

You have beheld how they, 

With wicker arts did come, 

To kiss and bear away 
The richer cowslips home. 

You ’ve heard them sweetly sing, 

And seen them in a round ; 

Each virgin like a Spring 
With honey-suckles crown’d. 

But now we see none here, 

Whose silv’ry feet did tread, 

And with dishevelled hair 
Adorn’d this smoother mead. 

Like unthrifts, having spent 
Your stock, and needy grown, 

You ’re left here to lament 
Your poor estates alone. 


The tenderness of feeling excited by the loveliness 
of the waning year begets a sympathy for this season 
more personal than for any other. It is the sympa¬ 
thy with decline and death, the awe before the mys¬ 
tery of which they are the avenue and gate. In the 
journey of the year, the Autumn is Venice, Spring 
is Naples certainly, and the majestic maturity of 


186 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Summer is Rome. Not dissimilar is the feeling with 
which you glide through the shadow of crumbling 
Venetian magnificence, and the sentiment with 
which you tread the gorgeous bowers of Autumn. 
What life, what hope, what illimitable promise, once 
filled the eye here, and fed the imagination ! Venice 
failed to fulfil that promise to experience. Has any 
summer ever kept it to the life ? 

See in the radiance and flashing cloud-forms of 
this sky, how the year repeats the story of June, how 
it murmurs these dying spring songs! Upon pen¬ 
sive thought you drift through the splendors of the 
decadent year, as in a black gondola through Venice. 

Over the gleaming watery meadows, 

Through the dusk of the palace shadows, 

Like a dark beam mournfully sliding, 

Steals the gondola, silently gliding. 

And the gardener, this morn belated, 

Urges his flower-hung barque; fruit-freighted, 

Like a Summer-perfected vision 
Through the dream of that sleep Elysian. 

To these palaces ghostly glory 

Clings, like the faintly remembered story 

Of an old diamonded dowager, mumbling 

Tales of her youth from her memory crumbling. 

It is not possible to shun the influence of these 
days. The deep dome of the sky frescoed by the 
last sunbeams with delicate tracery of vapors and lu- 


NEWPORT. 


187 


urinous masses of cloud, the endless extent of the sea, 
which only seems small when you are upon it, the 
uniform line of the coast, simple, grand material out¬ 
lined as grandly—these store your mind with sweet 
and solemn imagery, and indicate, even here, where 
the wassail-worship of our Ephesian Diana has but 
now reeled away, the altar of the unknown God. 

ISTor can you avoid wondering what evidence you 
shall find in the winter that the city has summered 
upon the seaside. If yearly we are thus submitted 
to the most beautiful and profound natural influences, 
and the tone of our society remains still as fiercely 
frivolous, it is not strange that the September mus- 
ings of a cynical Timon make him still more cynical. 
How can he help dreaming dreams of a race that 
should show throughout their winter life the fresh¬ 
ness and vigor of their summer neighborhood ? 

If a young man passes a few years in Europe and 
returns with nothing but the air of a figure in the 
last print of fashions, he can only please the ninth 
part of a man. He will pain and mortify all the 
rest. His mien, and motion, and conversation should 
show that he has seen, and heard, and felt, what so 
many yearn to behold, because they could see to the 
utmost, yet must die without seeing. 

A travelled man should be painting and sculpture. 
He should be radiant with art and informed with 


188 


LOTUS-EATING. 


experience: he should he a channel into the new 
world of all the best influences of the old, or he has 
defrauded his country, himself, and those who might 
have been all that he has failed to be, by not relin¬ 
quishing the opportunity to another. I look into his 
eyes, but instead of the Alps and Italy, I see only 
the Boulevards or Notre Dame de Lorette. I hear 
him speak, and catch a fine French oath, but no 
Miserere, no Campagna song or Barcarole. I mark 
his manner with women, but I do not perceive that 
ne has seen Raphael’s Madonnas; with men, but 1 
do not feel the presence of the Apollo or the manli¬ 
ness of Michael Angelo. Ixion has come down from 
heaven, having banqueted with all the Gods, and 
remembers only the pattern of the table-cloth. 

If this is our high requirement of the individual 
who has enjoyed fine opportunities, what should we 
not demand in the character of a society, which every 
year repairs to the fountains of mental and physical 
health? In its eye should be the clearness of the 
sky, in its voice the sound of the sea, in its move¬ 
ment the grace of woods and waves. 

It is very well to carry the country to the city, but 
is very ill to bring the city to the country. The in¬ 
fluence of the city is always to be resisted, because 
its necessary spirit is belittling, personal, and selfish; 
that of the country, on the other hand, is to be fos- 


NEWPORT. 


189 


tered, because it is impersonal and universal. The 
exhilarating stimulus of the contact of men in the' 
city is useful, sometimes essential, but always dan¬ 
gerous. The tranquillizing friendliness of the country 
favors repose, perhaps inactivity and intellectual 
rest, but is always humane and elevating. The city, 
in its technical, social sense, is always ludicrous, and 
if it were possible, insulting in the country. There 
is nothing finer in Nature and Art than the sublime 
scorn inherent in their yirginal purity. A great pic¬ 
ture will not be “seen,” nor a grand landscape 
“ done.” In the crowds of listless idlers who infest 
Rome yearly, how many see the Transfiguration, or 
hear the Miserere, or know the profound pathos of the 
Campagna? Nature and Art are veiled goddesses, 
and only Love and Humility draw the curtains. 

We must leave in the city, then, as far as possible, 
the social fictions of the city, if we hope ever to mas¬ 
ter them rather than to be mastered by them. And 
that is precisely what is most rarely done, precisely 
what we Americans do less than any other people. 

I remember, as we floated about the canals in 
Yenice, how we used to imagine a life and society 
worthy the climate and the poetic city. The women 
of those fancies were of beauty so rare, and of char¬ 
acter at once so lofty and lovely, that the sumptuous 
palaces and the superb portraits of Titian, and Tin- 


190 


LOTUS-EATING. 


toret, and Giorgione, were the only natural homes and 
ornaments of their life. The men of those dreams 
were so grave and gracious, of such intellectual 
sweep, of such subtle human sympathy, that no por¬ 
trait in the great council hall of the Doge’s palace 
quite suggested their mien. Life was a festival 
worthy its sphere—worthy the illimitable splendor 
and capacity of the world. 

They were but gondola dreams, those fancies,— 
the articulate song of the mystery and magnificence 
of Venice. They were only pictures on the air—the 
evanescent mirage of romance that hovers about that 
spot. Yet, was it strange that the pleasant dream 
inspired by so singular a triumph of Art as the city 
of Venice should return upon the cliffs at Newport, 
in view of the possibilities and influences of a society 
just beginning? 

Will you think me captious if I confess, what we 
all feel, that the life of Nature—Nature, whose head 
is Man—censures our life more than any philosophy ? 
If a man should pass suddenly from a regal midsum¬ 
mer day in Windsor Forest to a drawing-room at St. 
James, would he feel that he had advanced from the 
less to the greater ? The trees and flowers fulfil their 
utmost destiny; but the Right Honorable Sir Jabesh 
Windbag—as Timon Carlyle dubs the courtier—does 
he impart a finer charm to the summer day ? 


NEWPORT. 


191 


It was not strange that the Venetian life recurred, 
but it was sad. We shall never fulfil the destiny 
that Hope has allotted us, since Hope always paints 
human portraits with the colors of the Ideal. Even 
upon these cliffs the spring promised a brighter sum¬ 
mer than was possible; for the spring is a poet, and 
sings to us in our speech the visions beheld in another 
realm. Life is a rich strain of music suggesting a 
realm too fair to be. How often we seem to touch 
the edge of some high and poetic manner of life ; 
how we revenge ourselves upon drudgery and Wall- 
street, by fancying an eternal summer in Naples 
Bay, where the syrens should sing in the moonlight 
and every fisher-girl upon the shore should be Gra- 
ziella. Our ancestral estates—the possibilities of 
hoj>e of which we are heirs,—all lie in the future. 
In the golden tropics of distance flash their towers, 
and their trees lean over singing streams. There our 
coming is awaited, and the bells would fain chime 
that we are of age. There, looking from the win¬ 
dows, or deep retired in interior chambers, the beau¬ 
tiful who were our dream and our despair await us. 
Over those tropic lands the sun never sets—those 
flashing towers do never crumble,—in those palace 
gardens gush the fountains of eternal youth, and all 
the wide horizon forever flames with summer. 

So upon the most distant horizon of life hope floats, 


192 


LOTUS-EATING. 



a beautiful mirage. To reach those 
pleasant places is the aim of all 
our endeavors. A man would he rich, that 
he may have a line house hung with pictures 
and adorned with sculptures. Even the 
greatest drudge pays the homage to his 
nature, of, at least, saying that. In youth it 
/ seems that we could reach out our hands and 
ourselves unlock the doors. But those golden gates 
shall never he unbarred. Gradually they recede, 
clouds descend, and fogs rise, and at times obscure 
the spectacle altogether. We resign ourselves to our 
condition, we go about our work, but still that stately 
domain of ours glimmers before our eyes—a vision 
in the shifting clouds to the toiling husbandman. 
Still, strains of its wild and winning music peal 
down the wind, the sweet clang of court-revels to the 
lonely wanderer. 





NEWPORT. 


193 


Although we are thus defrauded of our rights, 
royalty never dies from our hearts, and, living in 
hovels, we are still the heirs of palaces. Strolling 
in this mood beneath the September sunsets I can 
yet see fair and graceful figures moving along the 
cliffs—fair and graceful enough to walk by the sea 
and under the sky, as kings and queens their halls. 

The great enjoyment at Newport is riding. The 
hard, black beach is the most perfect race-course, 
and the heaving of the sea sympathizes with the 
rider and inspires him. The finest beach in New¬ 
port is the second, a mile beyond the crescent beach 
by the town, but it always seems lonely and distant, 
and can only be gained by plowing along a sandy 
road among the wan fields upon the shore. On a 
pleasant afternoon the first beach is alive with run¬ 
ning horses, and light wagons. You know we are 
dandies in our carriages as well as in our dress, and 
while they play their little pranks upon the edge of 
the sea, which plunges slowly and heavily along the 
shore, the impression is that of the recumbent statue 
of the Nile in the Vatican and the garden of the 
Tuileries, covered and pleased with the gambols of 
the little ones. 

One evening in September I was returning with a 
friend, from the southern shore by Batemaifs. It 
was one of the golden twilights which transfigure the 
I 


194 


LOTUS-EATING. 


world. It seemed, in fact, as if we were very near 
that domain which lies so deep in the future, and 
our horses paced along cheerily, as if they shared 
the exhilaration of the hour. We passed through 
the town, by the groups sauntering on the road and 
sitting under the piazzas and at the windows of 
houses, and descended to the first beach. The sun 
was just gone and the sky was a dome of molten 
lead, except toward the eastern horizon upon the 
sea, where gray vapors gradually clouded the glory. 

We turned our backs upon the sunset and facing 
the sea and the gray east we leaned forward, and 
our horses flew over the beach. They did not seem 
to touch the earth, but we were borne on as if by the 
sway of the sea. Faster and faster we flew, and the 
cold line of the point before us, stretching far into 
the ocean, and the dull night that lowered beyond it, 
and the black beach beneath us, were as the stern 
landscape of the extremest north contrasted with the 
southern splendors we had left behind. It was wild 
and elfish, and the hoofs of the horses rang like the 
dumb cadence of an old saga. Our hair streamed 
on the wind that began to curdle chill across the sea, 
and gaining the end of the beach we reined up, 
turned suddenly, and were in another zone, in another 
world. 

The west was gorgeous, still, and warm. The lit- 


NEWPORT. 


195 


tie hill on which stands the town, and the fields be* 
tween it and us, were a belt of blackness drawn 
between the glow, of the west and the glossy, glitter¬ 
ing smoothness of the beach, upon whose moist sur¬ 
face the slant light of the late sunset blended with 
the moonlight that quivered along the crumbling 
ridges of the surf. The sea, beyond, heaved silvery 
far into the night. The gorgeous west—the black 
land—the glossy beach—the silvery sea,—these made 
up the world in that moment, nor was the world ever 
more beautiful and sublime. Along the way paved 
with gleams of sunset and of moonrisO, our horses 
slowly paced. No realm of fairy was ever more sur¬ 
prising and alluring; no such scene was yet painted 
on canvass or in print; and though it faded every 
moment and the world resumed its old expression, 
that glance has bewildered me forever, and I am not 
sure that it was not Undine who rode with me that 
evening and compelled the sun," moon, and sea to 
offer her magnificent homage. 

Like all sea-sides, Newport has those fogs and 
mists which are the delight of artists—which are 
themselves artists of a fantastic fancy—and to which 
even the belles are not always averse, for what the 
sun does the fog undoes, being the rare cosmetic that 
removes the brown scar of the sun’s touch. These 
fogs, however, are not always pleasant. They are 


196 


LOTUS-EATING. 


thick, drenching clouds, and wet you through as 
thoroughly as the most insinuating rain. Moreover 
they brood over your spirits with a dull gloom akin 
to their effect in extinguishing the landscape. But 
in coming and going, and wherever they are not too 
dense, they are very welcome to the lover of the 
picturesque. 

In the morning, perhaps, and especially in June 
and September, as you saunter under a cloudless 
sky, you see a vague roll of mist muffling the horizon 
line of the sea. If you have been bounding over the 
beach with Undine, the evening before, you are ac¬ 
climated to wonders, and fancy, simply, that a part 
of the sky has fallen upon the sea. Toward dinner 
you observe that it is nearer, that it advances, rolling 
over the sea and blotting out every thing in its path. 
The sun strikes a sail between you and it—there is 
a momentary flash, lost in the dull darkness of the 
mist. 

By dinner-time it beleaguers the Island—it over¬ 
comes it—it penetrates at windows and doors. Woe 
to starched muslin! Woe to cravats! Woe to choice 
note paper! Woe to every thing but India rubber 
shoes. The band may well play in the hall after 
dinner. The world beyond the piazza is a vast white 
opacity,—the ghost of the ocean which thus asserts 
the sea’s sovereignty over the Island. It is damp 


NEWPORT. 


197 


and chill. The music breathes winning waltzes,— 
but who could dance here, save mermaids—and Un¬ 
dine, haply, who loves the mists, and clothes herself 
with the grace of clouds ? The horses must be coun¬ 
termanded. A slight wind shivers through the 
dampness and the boughs in the little green yard by 
the piazza shed a string of diamonds. The gayety 
of Newport is suddenly quenched, and if you steal 
quietly up to your room, and opening your window, 
listen, you will hear the invisible sea encompassing 
the Island with its ceaseless dash, and booming soft 
scorn through the fog. 

It breaks suddenly, and in sounding masses recedes. 
The sun bursts through the mist and shines into our 
very hearts. The clouds roll away from our spirits, 
we leap into the saddle and give galloping chase to 
the skirts of the foe. Fold upon fold it sweeps re¬ 
treating over the Island—embracing the few melan¬ 
choly trees and leaving them glittering ; nor pauses 
at the shore, but softly over the water the flight of 
the fog continues, until our sky is rosy again as in 
the morning, and only a vague roll of mist muffles 
the horizon line of the sea. 

I rode one afternoon with Undine along the south¬ 
ern shore of the Island, by the lonely graves of which 
I have spoken. We could see only a few feet over 
the water, but the ocean constantly plunged sullenly 


198 


LOTUS-EATING. 


out of the heavy fog which was full of hoarse roars 
and wailings—the chaotic sound of the sea. We 
took the homeward path through the solitary fields, 
just unfamiliar enough to excite us with a vague 
sense of going astray. At times, gleams of sun¬ 
light, bewildered like ourselvesj struggled, surprised, 
through the mist and disappeared. But strange and 
beautiful were those estrays; and I well understood 
why Turner studied vapors so long and carefully. 

Two grander figures are not in contemporary biog¬ 
raphy than that of Coleridge, in Carlyle’s Sterling, 
looking out from Highgate over the mingled smoke 
and vapor which buries London, as in lava Pompeii 
is buried, and that of Turner, in some anonymous, 
but accurate, sketches of his latter days, at his cot¬ 
tage on the edge of London, where, apart from his 
fame, and under a feigned name, he sat by day and 
night upon the house-top, watching the sun glorify the 
vapors and the smoke with the same splendor that 
he lavishes upon the evening west, and which we 
deemed the special privilege of the sky. Those two 
men, greatest in their kind among their‘companions, 
illustrate with happy force what Wordsworth sang: 

In common things that round us lie, 

Some random truths he can impart, 

-The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 


NEWPORT. 


199 


Gazing from his Highgate window with “ large, 
gray eye,” did Coleridge see more than the image 
of his own mind and his own career, in that limit¬ 
less city, wide-sparkling, many-turreted, fading and 
mingling in shining mist—with strange voices call¬ 
ing from its clouds—the solemn peal of cathedral 
chimes and the low voice of the vesper bell ? And 
out of that London fog with its irresistible splendors, 
and out of the holy vapors which float serene amid 
the Alps, has Turner quarried his colossal fame. 
There is no grander lesson in any history of any art, 
than the spectacle of the greatest painter of our 
time, sitting upon his house-top, and from the mist 
which to others was but a clog and inconvenience, 
and associated in all men’s minds only with link 
boys and lanterns, plucking the heart of its mystery 
and making it worshipped and remembered. 

In the evening I found myself alone upon the 
beach, surrounded by the fog. I seemed to be upon 
the hard bottom of the sea, for nothing was visible 
save occasionally the moon, as the fog thinned over 
my head—the seemingly circular spot of beach upon 
which I stood—and the long, white seething line of 
surf that fell exhausted along the shore. The con¬ 
fused moan of the sea was the only and constant 
sound. Fascinated by the strangeness of the scene, 
lost in the fog, whose murky chill lay damp upon 


200 


LOTUS-EATING. 


my hands and face, I wandered over the beach. I 
ran, but could not escape the small round spot of 
black beach—the encompassing dead white cloud— 
the moon, blotted out and again revealed. I shouted 
aloud, but my voice fell flat and lost, and the mur¬ 
mur of the surf boomed in melancholy mockery. 1 
stood still, but the continuous sound did not destroy 
the weird silence. I ran to the edge of the sea ; the 
water broke over my feet and slid far up the beach 
and washed my tracks away. I advanced constantly 
with no sense of progress and saw suddenly a huge, 
fantastic figure looming ominously through the 
fog-cloud and confronting me. I stopped as if 
an army had risen before me, then ran toward 
the figure which dwindled into a shapeless block, 
left upon the sand, and distorted by the mist into a 
goblin. 

The wildness of the feeling passed. The constant 
iteration of the sea’s wail, that wandered through 
the enchanted silence as if seeking sympathy, grad¬ 
ually possessed my heart with its own sadness, and 
as the fog thinned slowly, and wreathed along the 
beach, curling and falling—skirts of the flowing 
drapery of Ossian’s ghosts—that exquisite and mourn¬ 
ful song in Alton Locke came singing into my mind. 
You remember the scene in which the life of the 
young poet culminates in the parlor of the Bishop 


NEWPORT. 


201 


and in the presence of the Lady Eleanor. She has 
been singing a wild, melancholy air, of which the 
words were poor, but whose meaning the poet feels 
in his inmost soul, quickened as he is-by the exhil¬ 
aration and intoxication of passion in which he was 
reeling. Lady Eleanor asks for some words fit for 
the melody, and struck by what he says, appeals to 
him to write them. 

At the same moment his eyes fall upon a water- 
color of Copley Fielding’s, representing a long, 
lonely reach of sea-beach—a shroud of rain drifting 
along the horizon, and straggling nets rising and 
falling upon the surf. Its utter desolation, though 
he little thinks it at the moment, images his own 
life, and returning home, in the wild whirl of name¬ 
less regret and passionate sorrow, he writes the lines. 
It is a rare fortune for the artist that his picture is 
so perfectly translated into words. Who that feels 
the penetrating j)athos of the song but sees the rain- 
shroud, the straggling nets and the loneliness of the 
beach ? There is no modern verse of more tragic 
reality. 

“ O, Mary, go and call the cattle home, 

And call the cattle home, 

And call the cattle home, 

Across the sands o’ Dee.” 

The Western wind was wild and dark wi’ foam, 

And all alone went she. 

I* 


202 


LOTUS-EATING. 


The creeping tide came lip along the sand. 

And o’er and o’er the sand, 

And round and round the sand, 

As far as eye could see; 

The blinding mist came down and hid the land, 

And never home came she. 

Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair— 

A tress o’ golden hair, 

O’ drowned maiden’s hair 
Above the nets at seal 

Was never salmon yet that shone so fair, 

Among the stakes on Dee. 

They rowed her in across the rolling foam. 

The* cruel, crawling foam, 

The cruel, hungry foam, 

To her grave beside the sea; 

But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home 
Across the sands o’ Dee, 

The night became more merciful as I sauntered 
homeward from the beach. The fog rolled away, 
the unclouded moon shone, and the air was warm 
and still. The lights were extinguished in the cotta¬ 
ges, only in the great hotels some windows were yet 
bright. I turned up a lane between two of the pleas¬ 
antest places upon the Island. Through the moonlit 
trees, like ghosts of sound haunting the moonlight, 
stole the faint tinkle of a guitar. A manly voice, 
rich and full, chimed in unison and sang this song of 
Browning’s, amid whose pauses the lessening mur¬ 
mur of the sea wistfully repeated that other refrain— 

Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair 1 


NEWPORT. 203 

The difference was that between the moon-misted 
sea-beach and the moonlight garden. 

—There’s a woman like a dew-drop, she’s so purer than the 
purest; 

And her noble heart’s the noblest, yes, and her sure faith’s the 
surest; 

And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of 
lustre 

Hid i’ the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wild grape’s 
cluster, 

Gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck’s rose-misted marble, 
And her voice’s music—call it the well’s bubbling, the bird’s war¬ 
ble. 

And this woman says, “ My days were sunless and my nights were 
moonless, 

Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark’s heart’s out¬ 
break tuneless, 

If you love me not”—and I, who (ah, for words of flame!) adore 
•her! 

Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before her— 

I may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice takes me, 

And by noontide as by midnight make her mine as hers she makes 
me. 

I hoped to have told you of the Corso or semi¬ 
weekly promenade at the Fort, which began gal¬ 
lantly enough, but declined rapidly because velvet- 
coated fast gentlemen would trot their fast horses 
over the ground as if it had been a race-course, and 
because, instead of forming two contrary lines of 
carriages, to enable us to pass, and see, and chat, or 
stopping, as at the Cascine in Florence, for conversa¬ 
tion, w r e all trotted meekly one way in eacn other’s 


204 


LOTUS-EATING. 


dust. With our graceful carriages and the famed 
beauty of American women, this should be one of 
the most attractive features of Newport. But out 
exaggeration spoiled it. What American is ever 
going behind ? What is the use of a 2.40, if you are 
to walk in a ring ? So we must wait a little, until 
jockeys ripen into gentlemen and eagerness mellows 
into elegance. I wonder if a wit from Mercury com¬ 
ing to summer on the earth, would suspect that our 
Newport aim was enjoyment. 

But there is another Fort, a circular ruin upon the 
rocky point of an island at the entrance of the har¬ 
bor, which you can reach in a half-hour from New¬ 
port, and is well worth an afternoon. Deere recruited 
a party one day for the excursion. We went into the 
town and put olf from the wharf in a fleet sail-boat. 
The harbor was white and alive with similar craft, 
bending in the wind and scudding to and fro. We 
passed under the long, low embankment of Fort 
Adams and across the mouth of the harbor to a group 
of mound-like rocks. Crowning the summit of one 
of them was our goal, called, appropriately enough 
from the aspect of the rocks, Fort Dumpling. 

You glide from the beautiful harbor directly into 
the smooth water of the cove-like reaches among the 
rocks. The bright vegetation clinging to the crevices 
of their sides is touched Turneresquely by the after- 


NEWPORT. 


205 


noon sun, and as you land upon the island, its low, 
bare, melancholy outline reminds you of days and 
feelings upon the Roman Campagna. You climb 
over the rocks, and pasture lands luxuriant with 
scentless asters, crisp everlasting, and yellow golden 
rods, and find them the only garrison of the ruined 
old fort, which is perched upon a cliif over the sea. 
They nod along the ramparts, and flame in the 
crumbling walls. Girls toss pebbles through the 
port-holes, and muse upon the distant sails at sea. 

But best of all, quaint old Newport lies white 
against its hill, and the sinking sun plays with it, 
making it what city you will, of all the famous and 
stately towns upon the sea. 

Let us leave it so, the last picture of a pleasant 
Summer, beneath which we will write this inscrip¬ 
tion : 


THE REAPER. 

I walked among the golden grain, 
That bent and whispered to the plain, 
How gaily the sweet Summer passes, 
So gently treading o’er us grasses.” 

A sad-eyed Reaper came that way, 
But silent in the singing day— 

Laying the graceful grain along, 

That met the sickle with a song. 

The sad-eyed Reaper said to me, 

“ Fair are the Summer fields you see; 


206 


LOTUS-EATING. 


Golden to-day—to-morrow gray; 

So dies young love from life away.” 

“’T.is reaped, but it is garnered well,*’ 

I ventured the sad man to tell: 

“ Though Love declines, yet Heaven is kind— 
God knows his sheaves of life to bind.” 

More sadly then he bowed his head, 

And sadder were the words he said, 

“ Tho’ every Summer green the plain, 

This harvest can not bloom again.” 



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